One thing I love about literature is the way words bring out pictures in our mind that our eyes could never see or make sense of. For my birthday, Amy got me a copy of Hyperion by Dan Simmons, a futuristic Canterbury Tales set in a universe so utterly foreign that it took me three or four tries to get my head around what I was reading and really get started. Books like this force you to stop trying to categorize things into easy boxes and require you to allow your imagination to roam, to consider options and possibilities outside your expectations.

It would be easy to say that photography is strictly the domain of the literal. We quickly snap photos that are perfect captures of light, physics frozen on a sensor or film. But photography is also about limiting the viewer’s field of vision, leaving out light and working in shadows. When we leave out information and allow the image to work as an abstract expression of some other emotion, that’s when imagination takes over and the literal fades away. That’s when we begin to write our own stories on the photographs we see and interact with photography in a creative way rather than simply observing.

This week we’re asking our writers and readers to allow happy accidents to rule and to reimagine their photography in such a way that allows the viewer to contribute. We’re getting in close again and saying, “Guess what it is?!”  Make sure to post your close-up shots to the Digital Photography Blogs Flickr group and let us know which is your favorite.