On vision

 On Vision

11/18/10

If I may diverge a bit from the usual travelogue.  After more than 90 days on the road I would like to ruminate on human vision and how and why we see things.  I think we all need a break from the pattern of: I woke up, I did this, I saw this, I ate this, I went to sleep!  Perhaps it is being constrained by this formulaic outline that I have in the past revolted into various rants.  A friend said that my loud ranting in the face of human folly is acceptable. Yet, my rants will not lead to improvements in whatever it is that is bothering me at the time.  I am left instead with a feeling of impotence.  

So let me talk about my thoughts on vision and related themes of perception.

I have thought on and off about this for many years and without realizing it in print my thoughts have been unorganized and scattered.    I do not expect my  

posits to break any ground but rather hopefully clarify why I see what I see.

We all know that we cannot experience the actuality of what others are experiencing  but rather we can only experience the experiencing of the experience of others.  We are all prisoners of our own experience and our own visions.

Several days ago while looking at a wondrous sight I glanced at the camera in my hand and shook my head in the ineptitude in trying to replicate my vision let alone my experiential totality in that moment of time.

Now realizing the tenuousness of the statement “It’s a poor craftsman that blames his tools,”  I would come to a  back handed defense of the craftsman with inadequate tools.   I have been an amateur photographer for 50 years and have updated systems every 4 - 5 years.  Lately I have been moving towards smaller and lighter equipment as lenses and digitalization continue to improve in quality and become incorporated in popular point and shoots.   Point and shoot is a misnomer these digital days.  Speed, metering, and focus, have continued to leap forward so that most images can be quite good despite the lack of vision in those doing the point and shooting.   But, who is to say that the democratized images that are thus produced are any less meaningful than images that have been “professionally” composed and created that push the art towards art.  Still I find my photos lacking in the impact that comes from razor sharp clarity.  I know other systems have done me better in the past.  Perhaps the search for sharpness it a reaction to my aging eye sight.   So this got me thinking on the degradation of the image at each stage of replication.   I do not think that most of us completely trust that digitalization is capable of exact replication into some nth degree without some degradation.  We want to believe that our first initial vision is the most “pure.’ We are still reluctant to give up human control of the quality of perception.  At the very least we tell ourselves that it is our decision as to when we press the shutter, our decision, our choosing that maintains the humanness of control, the art, over digitalization.  Yet in the back of our minds we are nagged by the idea that our digitized vision is so democratized so replicable and deliverable that we no longer have real control and it is no longer ours.

And, there is still much that we as serious photographers will never be satisfied with.  Serious photographers are mostly never satisfied with the light given them.  It does not matter how much equipment they have the light is never just right.  Light is their excuse as well as their raison d’être.  We wish to change the vision before us with, shutter speeds, aperture openings, focal lengths, metering, iso settings, lens speed, filters, etc.  And still finding no satisfaction resort to Photoshop.  We will bend reality to our acceptable perception of vision. 

Why do we persist in needing the photo as recordation of our vision?  The still photo hangs around.  It is replicable.  It can be shared thru out humanity.  It does not matter whether it is a professional photo or not.  But photographers are not immune to artistic aspirations.  After all we all strive to find meaning in what we do for our own self serving validations.  Other wise why bother.

Photographers will elevate their craft to aspirations of art in the act of bringing themselves at the least self validation and at the most illusive  fame.

There are times when finding ourselves without a camera for whatever reason we do not trust our vision and our memory of that vision for future recall.  We need to recall.  We need to know that our memories can be depended upon to allow us to survive in the wilderness.  We need to remember what dangers look like.  We need to know what loved ones and family looks like since it is tragic but true that we can forget faces of loved ones given even a brief passage of time.  We are lost without our visual memory.

So the prudent thing to do would be to commit to memory that which we need to survive in this word and for the most part we do this to know what it is we need to live. How can we do this?   We study, we memorize, we bank away experience. We bank our experiences in song and story and in text and hard drives and film and technologies and a myriad other ways.   We tell ourself that knowledge is power and the more power we have the better our chances of living successfully for longer periods of time. 

Since we are creatures primarily of vision our other senses of perception have been relegated to secondary status.  We all know how our  diminished sense of smell can still drive us back intensely and almost completely  to some moment in the past but it no longer happens that often. We are startled when our other senses jump forward.  Our eyes are evolving larger and our ears and noses becoming smaller.  We humans are evolving into pure visual processing beings.

Who cares?  Physical evolution not in your lifetime, or your great great grand children right?  Yet look how we have changed in the last 300 years our biological health and physical bearing.  And time moves quicker the further it gets along.

How long can you hold a visual memory and as much of the encompassing other sensory inputs that accompany the moment?  Five minutes? 5 months? 5 years?  Probably only seconds.

There will always be a degree of degradation relative to the time elapsed from the moment visually held.  I am happy that I have a few such memories that are just as vivid as if they happened now.  How is this possible? I have no magical powers of recall.   I  remember scenes that had such an impact on me that as they were occurring  because I knew I had to remember what I was seeing and what I was feeling.  It was a conscious effort to take in everything and fix it in my mind, my ears, my nose, my skin.  I ticked off as many sensory inputs as I could and rolled each one around in my eyes, ears, nose, mouth and skin.  I wanted to keep these moments for as long as I could.  I told myself aloud that I wanted this therefore I must  perform these exercises to increase my chances of training my neuro synapsis for recall.  After all we do this to learn how to  drive, perform athletics, do computations, speak and all that we do so why not be able to commit visions and attendant feelings and emotions in the same but deliberate way.

My children's birth come to mind, and a vision of Nicholas my son on the shores of Moran State Park’s Mountain Lake with the low angled sun firing up the emerald fir trees that towered behind him as from a distance he waved.  This vision is perfect, though not more than an instant long,  permanently fixed and I treasure it as replicable only in my visions being and not in a photograph.  We all have these but perhaps there has not been as conscious an effort to systematically hold on to these moments in most people.  I believe there are artists who are more adept, certainly than I am, at holding many more images as it is part of their reason for being, their catalog of life,  their soup, needed for the creation of their art.   The more dedicated they are to their art the more adept they are holding and recalling such visions.   Perhaps that is why they can be called “Men of Vision.”