Our species has evolved over millions of years. Our own set of tools, the ones, at least, that we use in making or viewing photographs, is a very recent development. It is of no use to hunters/gatherers to cultivate an abstract sense of space. For them, survival depends not upon understanding context; rather, they must separate plants and animals, their food, from context.
Imagine two stone age hunters standing at the edge of the forest. One says to the other "I think it would look better if that bison would move about three feet over to the left". No, the appropriate thing to do is to nail it right in the heart with an arrow. Without being able to center one's attention on the vital spot, the bull's eye, the community doesn't eat.
I believe this instinct is alive and well in all of us. The cultivation of an appreciation for the contents of a frame, a sense of a whole space, is a sort of add-on, a luxury, if you think about it. In order for it to be meaningful, we have to have time and enough prosperity that we don't have to scrap for each meal. It doesn't come with the package we are born with. Many people, as Mr. Eggleston points out, really have no interest in developing that sense.
If circumstances change, and we find ourselves refugees as so many are today, we will need to rely upon the more basic and one could say primitive ability to isolate what we can eat, what we can shoot (!) from its context. Without being able to do that, we'd be helpless without our social support structures. While I am committed to a broader and more inclusive reading of context, an abstract spatial sensitivity, I think we too often forget how we depend on more basic skills and have a tendency to think ourselves superior because we've gone beyond them. I think it is important to go beyond them, but at least as important, not to lose them in the process.
Imagine two stone age hunters standing at the edge of the forest. One says to the other "I think it would look better if that bison would move about three feet over to the left". No, the appropriate thing to do is to nail it right in the heart with an arrow. Without being able to center one's attention on the vital spot, the bull's eye, the community doesn't eat.
I think an equally strong argument could be made for those hunters seeing the entire "picture". A hunter with tunnel vision would probably be either a hungry or a dead one. To make a kill but not notice the leopard in the tree or the lioness in the grass off to the side is not healthy. In fact, I would think that those hunters not only took in the whole visual picture, but also adding all the other senses to create a "picture" that included smells, touch (in the form of wind blowing across the hair on their skin) and sound.
Another strong argument might be made that the propensity to focus on only the center might be a more recent trend...started with specialization and hurried along by hours of staring at TV's and now computers.
Vaughn
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At least with LF landscape, a bad day of photography can be a good day of exercise.
When I started in photography at about the age of 12 I think I was more interested in cameras as mechanical objects and the images I produced were not particularly inspiring. They were the typical rectangle with an object in the centre as mentioned above.
It is only during the last ten years (approximately) that I have started to notice different lighting, shapes within the image and to think about composition. I am still interested in the mechanical aspect, especially when looking inside a Compur shutter and being amazed by the fact that someone designed something so complex without the aid of a computer CAD system but (hopefully) my skills in seeing and producing a pleasing image have improved over the years.
I think an equally strong argument could be made for those hunters seeing the entire "picture". A hunter with tunnel vision would probably be either a hungry or a dead one.
You are certainly correct. I think that it is likely that both of these visual modes would be necessary for survival. I appreciate your pointing this out.
There is a difference, though, between the kind of vision that we experience in photography, where what's included has the boundaries of the frame, and the more global perspective that our hunters must have had. Theirs would be, it seems to me, more of a self-awareness in context, and, as you rightly suggest, would not be simply visual at all. It is entirely possible to make photographs with little or none of that, although the analogy extends to that factor in photography as well. One could easily back off the edge of a cliff while trying to include just a little more within the frame. I've never done that with a cliff, but I certainly have stepped off a curb inadvertently.
I've always been amused at our term "shooting". I can't recall whether I posted an image of a deer that a student gave me, where the diagonals intersected exactly where you would want to hit the deer with your bullet or arrow to drop it on the spot. I won't put it here (again? This thread has gone on for awhile and I don't want to repeat myself) but if you'd like to see it, here's a link: http://farm1.static.flickr.com/38/10...a9ad121e_o.jpg
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Another strong argument might be made that the propensity to focus on only the center might be a more recent trend...started with specialization and hurried along by hours of staring at TV's and now computers.
This is an interesting idea, especially the part about specialization. I once read (I believe it was in the Encyclopedia Britannica 1910 edition in an article about him) that Goethe was the last person who could be legitimately identified as a "renaissance man", someone who had a command of all areas of knowledge. After him, according to that article, the quantity of information accelerated to levels that no one can comprehend more than a small part of it. If it is true that the source of that was the 1910 Britannica, what would that author say today? In an environment of information such as we have, we have to specialize or at least limit our field. In doing so, we exclude vast amounts of material. To have that global sense of "self in context" would be some feat!
What came instantly to my mind concerning the tendency to focus on the center was the religious icon; hardly a recent development. I think the central focus with the elimination of even the frame itself has been with us for a very long time. I'm more inclined to see our notions of two dimensional space as the more recent phenomenon, having its roots in the nineteenth century, especially with the impressionists.
Recognizing the beauty and strangeness in something familiar might be the first step back in order to move forward for someone re-learning to see.
Moving beyond a mere picture of a thing and embracing the whole of a visual composition is what I believe to be one of the the first steps in "photographic seeing" but to move beyond even that, for gravity and tension to carry on beyond the edge of the frame, and the "center" of the photograph to play with other "centers" is something that I believe carries far past simple evolutionary conditionings.
The gatherer would be inhibited by predatory vision, however artists are supposedly hunters.
Interesting thread.
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--J Brunner, The Prints of Darkness
Moving beyond a mere picture of a thing and embracing the whole of a visual composition is what I believe to be one of the the first steps in "photographic seeing" but to move beyond even that, for gravity and tension to carry on beyond the edge of the frame, and the "center" of the photograph to play with other "centers" is something that I believe carries far past simple evolutionary conditionings.
Are we getting into a region where language becomes troublesome? Or, can you help us better understand where you are pointing? I think we are a very diverse group, and I wouldn't want to assume that what I find in your statement would correspond to what it might mean for anyone else.
Recognizing the beauty and strangeness in something familiar might be the first step back in order to move forward for someone re-learning to see.
Well put!
The gatherer would be inhibited by predatory vision, however artists are supposedly hunters.
Artist as hunters...I "see" myself as more of a gatherer, I suppose. I do use the term "shooting", but relunctantly. Hunting is a rather manly thing...and since in relatively recent times (since the beginning of the written word, anyway), hunting has been given an over-riding importance...seeing how history has been written mostly by men.
It is far more likely that stone-age man (woman) were more gatherer -- and scavenger of already dead things -- than hunter.
But in reality, to put ourselves into the minds of the primitive hunter/gatherers and to determine how they thought and saw, is several times more difficult than it would be for someone who spoke no Chinese to think in Chinese.
Vaughn
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At least with LF landscape, a bad day of photography can be a good day of exercise.
...It is far more likely that stone-age man (woman) were more gatherer -- and scavenger of already dead things -- than hunter.
I wonder. Gathering? Yes, we know that there was/is a lot of harvesting. But scavenging? I don't think so. Having photographed thousands of projectile points for a major archaeological project in central Washington (US) I can tell you for sure; those people were really, really into hunting! They had a dizzying variety of points for animals of every size, from small birds on up.
We think of stone age people as "primitive" much to our own loss. Their technologies were often very highly developed and they had civilizations that were quite advanced beyond the conceptions we have of them, including well developed long distance trade. Even the term "stone age" suggests rock throwing, rather than launching projectiles tipped with sharp glass - well, stone, but some of them are indeed essentially the same as glass. If you have ever felt a newly knapped point, you know it can be sharper than a razor. Some of the points are poorly made, some very well made, but we know that people have different skill capacities even in the corporate world.
Man oh man , look around, look at the surroundings , look at the places people live in , those caves have symetries , they have walls ( frames) , it's not just TV , the things we wear ...eat...
Do we learn to see?
John said we forgot how to , we knew , but we forgot and need to re-learn... I agree
We need to relearn daily/hourly/momentarily , but how? close your eyes... funny, ha?
There is nothing like to see something for the first time or ability to see that way all the time, child-like with the knowledge of an elder.
So, how do you do that ? By beeng self aware all the time! YES , madness, is it not? you actually become so sensitive to surroundings that you can not function,I mean you become so sensitive that when you see , I mean really see , it hurts , physically hurts.
I've been there it is an amazing state of being ,
BUT
Reality , yes that miserable , miserable thing we call reality , it seem to always pull us back , does it not?
Oh well,
May be it's only me and what I write is all weird to most even here, among people that can see ...
we all know how to see, but we forgot and had to remember.
I think these are wise words. How many times a week do you drive down a road where you don't even see the traffic signs anymore? Then you compare that to driving down a road you've never driven before. Here you are forced to look out for things that might kill you, you are forced outside your day to day comfort zone.
If people were forced to look at things a different way, beyond their comfort zone, beyond how they normally look at things, I'm sure there would be a few revelations.
Many times I find that few people understand what I photograph. They say 'nice picture' and then proceeds to talk about something else, because it doesn't mean anything to them. The hard work we put ourselves through to realize our own vision, feelings, desires, what have you, does likely not produce post card material. Another photographer or artist might appreciate it, because they've practiced, they have forced themselves to look beyond the norm.
Aren't we all surrounded with what seems like a tidal wave of mediocrity? How many digital (and film) snapshots exist in the world? How many photographs of a face smack in the middle of the frame compared to finely crafted portrait, figure, landscape, street, or architectural photographs? Mediocrity is the norm, and people have to take a huge leap beyond the norm to appreciate and study a work of art that is of excellent composition, meaning, shape, tone, and skill. Or even to recognize it.
Seven years ago when I first picked up my camera, my negatives were crap. Today some of the negatives I create mean something to me. So I have evolved, I have learned. But it's impossible to tell whether I had to re-learn what I already knew, or if I invented my own wheel. I do know that I have deliberately forced myself beyond my old way of seeing, and that I continue to challenge myself to see, to explore, to find new things in places I would have never considered years ago.
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