Source A: A place behind the display

An original contemporary non-fiction-style practice text, written for this question.

I helped prepare a small exhibition about the marshes where I grew up. The first version of the display had a wide photograph of reeds, a map and a short paragraph about the birds that lived there. It was neat, and visitors stopped to look. My neighbour, Mrs Khan, read the paragraph and asked where the people were.

I had thought of the marsh as a landscape. She reminded me that families had walked its paths for generations. Her father had counted birds there before work; she now took her grandchildren to watch the tide. A fisherman who visited the planning meeting spoke about the sudden fog that could hide the bank. A volunteer described the path he cleared each winter. Their accounts did not make the birds less important. They made the place harder to sum up.

We added a short recording of Mrs Khan describing the walk to the water and a note about the volunteers who maintained the path. We kept the map and the bird list, but removed a sentence calling the marsh an untouched wilderness. It had always been used and cared for.

The exhibition still left most stories outside its walls. I was glad the display had changed, but I no longer thought of it as a complete portrait. It was an invitation to notice that the same place could mean different things to the people who knew it.

Source B: The square outside the frame

An original contemporary non-fiction-style practice text, written for this question.

I was asked to produce a photo essay about the town square for the local newspaper. I went on market day, when striped awnings covered the paving and the fountain was surrounded by families. The photographs were lively and clear. My editor laid them across the desk and asked what happened in the square when the stalls had gone.

I returned before sunrise on Wednesday. A cleaner guided his machine around the benches; a delivery driver crossed with crates; two nurses walked through at the end of a night shift. Later, an older man showed me the table where his friends played chess in the afternoon. None of this made my market pictures wrong. It showed how quickly I had mistaken the most colourful hour for the whole place.

We kept three market photographs, but placed them beside a grey dawn image and a quieter picture of chess pieces on a stone table. I asked people for one-sentence captions. The cleaner called the square “the start of my route”; one trader called it “where the town wakes up”. The phrases did not agree, and I did not force them into one message.

A newspaper page could not include every hour. Still, the white gaps between the photographs seemed honest. They reminded me that a frame chooses what is visible, and that a place continues beyond it.