Guardian Camera Club: Tony Cole on framing a subject

The train. Sometimes I feel that life is passing me by, not slowly either, but with ropes of steam and spark-spattered wheels and a hoarse roar of power or terror. It's passing, yet I'm the one who is doing all the moving. I'm not the station, I'm not the stop; I'm the train. I'm the train.. Photograph: Tony Cole/Flickr

Priapus Photograph: Tony Cole/Flickr

No friends but empty chairs. Leeds, Sunday morning. Walking around in the park Should feel better than work: The lake, the sunshine, The grass to lie on, Blurred playground noises Beyond black-stockinged nurses - Not a bad place to be. Yet it doesn't suit me. Toads revisited - Philip Larkin Photograph: Tony Cole/Flickr

The true picture of life as it is . The true picture of life as it is, if it could be adequately painted, would show men what they are, and how they might rise, not, indeed, to perfection, but one step first, and then another on the ladder - Anthony Trollope (The Eustace Diamonds) Photograph: Tony Cole/Flickr

The guillotine . 'The guillotine is the ultimate expression of Law, and its name is vengeance; it is not neutral, nor does it allow us to remain neutral. All social questions achieve their finality around that blade. It is the executioner's accomplice; it consumes, devouring flesh and drinking blood. It is a kind of monster created by the judge and the craftsman; a spectre seeming to live an awful life born of the death it deals...'. From Hugo's Les Misérables Photograph: Tony Cole/Flickr

Another secret garden '..the few books she had read and liked had been fairy-story books, and she had read of secret gardens in some of the stories. Sometimes people went to sleep in them for a hundred years, which she had thought must be rather stupid. She had no intention of going to sleep, and, in fact, she was becoming wider awake every day which passed...' Photograph: Tony Cole/Flickr