You might say that the standout element in the below image, snapped at Las Vegas McCarran airport six or seven years ago, is the blonde in the chair. Naturally. But in my view the blonde is secondary because the photo is mainly about the feelings generated by (a) the white pants, (b) the Italian brown suede lace-ups and (c) the blackness outside.

Don’t misunderstand — the woman is a key element in the overall composition. Without her the photo would amount to a lot less. But the message of the photo isn’t “wow, look at the blonde” — the message is “airport lounges are mostly about avoidance and meditation…feelings of postponement, waiting, pausing and studying phone screens as a way of not contemplating your life…hundreds of people chilling and texting and trying not to ask themselves ‘what is my life? how did I get here? what does it all amount to?”

Similarly, the focus of the Kate Hudson photo (which she herself posted) isn’t her toplessness, her carefully draped blonde hair or the big white coffee cup. Or at least, not for me. The focus of the photo are the peaked rooftops, and trying to guess which European city Hudson was in when she snapped this. The rooftops don’t look Parisian, Cote d’Azur, Costa del Sol, Italian, British or Czech…not quite. My best guess is somewhere in Sweden, Norway, Poland, Germany or Austria.