May 2024: The purpose of the blog hasn’t changed all that much since 2009 – the focus has shifted from photography to Morse – they are but differnt chapters of the same book.
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2009: The motivation behind this blog is pretty straightforward; I wanted a place to explore ideas and topics that come up; inspired by discussions with friends, perhaps from my own attempts to better understand the emotional and intellectual processes that go into making photographs, or simply inspired by life that just goes whizzing on by. This is not because I think I’m God’s gift to photography – far from it! But learning how to see is not something one achieves and is then finished with – seeing is a way of life – the job is never done. So, if something I write sparks an idea or two or helps you get closer to your own goals, yay! But truth be known I expect to learn from it – to become a better photographer (maybe even a better person :-)
A couple of years back I was diagnosed with Glaucoma, which, you probably know, can make you blind. It may have been the irony of that diagnosis that got me back into photography again a few years back. Who knows? Well, I’m far from having lost my eyesight, but earlier this year, sitting in a darkened room bathed in amber light – rather like B&W darkroom safelights – I noticed that the vision in my right eye is a full stop or so darker than in my left eye… ooooh… hmmm… the thought Blind Photographer occurred to me… this time the irony not lost…
As the weeks passed I realized there was an old metaphor in there (I’m big on metaphors). Seeing is not just a matter of having eyes; not just brightness, shape, color, and texture (BSCT). The things in a photo have meaning too; a picture of a child means something to us all, but child’s paretns “see” something quite different than, say, someone glimpsing the same image during a Flickr click-by-viewing.
Edward Weston spoke of striving to photograph “the thing itself” devoid of interpretive artifice. Viewed with this rubric his life was a process of progressively stripping away his own ego – it was not him that was important, not his ego; it was understanding his subjects well enough to isolate the elements that evoked pure feeling within him – what about a subject – the thing itself – evoked response. Then, through craft, he was stricing to present those elements so that you tooo could feel it. His genius was not in the camera he used or how he processed his images; his genius was in seeing and communicating what he saw. We bring ourselves to the subject that we may feel; we bring our cameras to the subject that we may record; we bring our minds to the subject that we may share – and change.
The image you see is (You + the image). Just as contrasts of BSCT are the essence of the image as a graphic, so contrasts of context and content are the essence of the image in the intellectual and emotional domains. These contrasts extend beyond visual limits: to paraphrase Bucky Fuller, the image is more than the sum of its graphical parts.
That is to say, seeing is done with the mind… not with the eyes. I’m not going blind; I’m learning how to see.
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