On Learning to See

Back in my undergraduate days at Johns Hopkins my friend Peter took me to a party thrown by an artist friend of his. The man had been a Hopkins undergraduate, but was now studying for an MFA at the Maryland Institute College of Art, and, appropriately, living in a loft. And I mean a loft, not a luxury apartment that has been installed in the shell of an old warehouse or factory building. This loft had a rough concrete floor, unfinished walls, no interior walls, and was heated by a wood-fired stove.

At some point in the party people gathered around an 8mm movie projector pointed at a sheet on the wall. The projector started and the sheet filled with flickering areas of white, grays, and black. There were no titles announcing the film, nor had I heard anyone say what we’d be watching. All I had to go on was those evanescent shadows playing on the sheet.

This went on for 5, 10, maybe 20 seconds or more, and then suddenly SHWUP! the flickering shadows disappeared, or, if you will, morphed into a naked couple having sex while standing. She was to the right, her upper body bent forward a bit, with her hands against the wall. He was behind her, pumping away.

I watched. Fascinated. Of course.

For I’d never seen such a thing before, nor, truth be told, done such a thing. I knew of course that such things happened and I wanted to know more. I’d seen still photos and drawings, but they’re different because, well, they’re still. No motion to decode. It was the motion that threw me off. Until my eye-mind could resolve the motion, the figures that did the moving remained mysterious. Once my brain copped to the motion, then, and only then, could I see what was happening. And that despite the fact that it had been in front of me the whole time.

I suspect, though I don’t know this, that if the film had opened with a useful descriptive title – “Jack and Jill: Up Against the Wall, Sweetcakes” – I’d have had no trouble seeing Jack do Jill from the get-go. Nor did I hear anyone say “Hey, kids, let’s watch a stag film.” Had that happened, then, yes, I’d have known what to expect, how to decode the incoming patches of flickering grey.

Active Vision

Vision, like all the senses, is active, not passive. The eye-mind always looks for something, probing the luminous flux that feeds its needs and desires. The eye-mind uses its own internally generated patterns to ‘capture’ patterns in the light flux. That capturing is perception.

Most of the time we move about in a world familiar to us, often intimately familiar down to the smallest detail, our everyday world: the home, the office, the supermarket, the filling station, the beauty parlor. The eye-mind is well prepared to capture the flux thrown off by this familiar world. But even when we visit an exotic land for the first time ever, we go there with our eye-mind stocked full of images of things we’re going to see there.

It has to be this way, because the world is too rich for us to take in anew each and every moment of each and every day. And so we see it through the memories of things we’ve seen and done before. It’s like the eye-brain is an organic movie projector that casts images on the world as we move through it. As long as the incoming sense data is consistent with the images we’re casting into it things are fine. When there’s a mismatch, when the image we cast isn’t matched by the incoming light, then we’re startled. We take notice and we go on the defensive: Perhaps the world’s changed in a dangerous way?

When I saw those flickering lights, I didn’t know what images to cast into the flux. It took awhile to figure out what I was to expect and so to cast. Only when the eye-brain had done that could I see, really see.

The Innocent Eye

It can’t always have been like that, of course. The newborn infant comes from a womb-world where there’s nothing to see. It’s dark in there. And so its eye-mind greets the external world with few expectations. Though it does have some expectations. Neonates are interested in human faces, even crude representations of faces. But not much else.

The neocortex of the infant’s brain is immature. Its neurons lack insulating the myelin sheaths that isolate neurons from one another. The infant is running on its so-called lizard brain while the newer and “higher” portions of the brain come up to speed in the world – a process that takes years.

The infant’s eyes scan the world several times per second – saccades they’re called. Everyone’s eyes scan the world, but the older child, not to mention the adult, knows pretty much what’s coming in from one split second to the next. Almost every saccade is a successful cast. The infant doesn’t know, and so each saccade is a minor adventure in visual exploration. The infant’s eye-mind casts a pattern into the flux without knowing what that pattern will attract.

In time, of course, the infant learns the world, learns what to expect, learns to see. The cortex matures into a repository of sensory expectations with which to guide the questing eye.

As the questing eye loses its innocence, the sense of visual adventure dissipates. The world becomes the world. Safe, secure, predictable. And a bit dull.

How do we go on the visual prowl, once again?

We Can Take Photographs

And that’s what I’ve been doing for the past several years. I bought a point-and-shoot camera in the Summer of 2004 so I could take photos of Chicago’s new Millennium Park. After that I took some photos around the neighborhood now and then, but nothing systemic, nothing rigorous. It was all casual.

Then, in the Fall of 2007, I discovered graffiti. In the neighborhood, actually, but in places one didn’t ordinarily go. Not necessarily secret places nor hidden places. Just not in the mundane flow of things.

This was a new and different world, and I decided to explore it systematically. So I bought a single-lens reflex camera, the cheapest I could find (a Pentax KD-100) and went to work. The idea was to document more or less all graffiti within walking distance of my apartment, to photograph the same walls at different hours of the day, and in different seasons of the year. And above all, to catch changes on the walls as old graffiti is painted out by new.

But I also took those photos as a way of training my eyes to see the graffiti. Some graffiti is quite intricate. One can see the complexity and infer the skill, but that doesn’t mean that one comprehends the flow. And so I would take overall shots and detail shots, moving back and forth, left and right, my movement becoming part of the photographic process. That movement, of course, isn’t going to be visible in the photographs. But it’s there in my mind as part of my understanding of those photos.

Flowers

These days I’m photographing flowers. Nothing exotic. Just flowers in my neighborhood, lots of petunias, black-eyed-susans, daisies, tiger-lilies, whatever. The challenge, for me, is in playing with the depth of field.

What part of the image is in focus? There is a standard answer to that question: the subject. That is to say, whatever is in the foreground, whatever the photograph is about, that’s will be in focus while the rest of the image may be blurred. It depends on the distance between the camera and the subject(s). If you’re shooting a landscape, chances are that everything will be acceptably in focus. But if you’re shooting someone’s portrait, that’s different. Your subject will usually be relatively close to the camera; the settings that put the subject sharp focus will also blur the background.

Flowers are like that as well. They’re relatively small, so you’re going to be relatively close to them – anywhere from a few inches to a few feet away. At those distances some part of the whole image is going to be in focus, and some will be blurred. The standard solution to this problem is to put the flower, or group of flowers, front and center; get them in focus, let everything else blur.

But you don’t have to do it that way. Why not focus on something deep in the image field and get that in focus and left the fore ground flower or flowers be blurred? Why not get the middle range of the image in focus and let the foreground and background both be blurred? And just how much of the image should be in focus anyhow? 60% 30% 5%?

There are know laws about any of these things. You can play around. And you can learn to see your playthings. Really see them.