Hear the talk:
My wife takes thousands of pictures -- and I am not exaggerating -- thousands and thousands and thousands. Recently we went on a two week vacation to Greece: she took over ten thousand pictures. We are now visiting the Canyons out west -- Grand Canyon, Bryce Canyon, Zion Canyon. By the time we get back home, she will have taken close to twenty thousand pictures.
Almost everybody who sees her taking so many pictures is, for a variety of reasons, shocked. How will she deal with so many pictures? When will she have time to organize, view, deal with, such a huge number of pictures? To give her her due, she does organize them, deal with them, delete some, improve others. She is diligent, spends countless hours photographing and then countless hours cataloging.
But more than anything else, people believe she can’t possibly be looking and enjoying, she is obsessed with photographing and cataloging. Her own daughter is shocked at her behavior. “Stop it Mummy,” she yells, “You are taking too many pictures. You aren’t seeing what is in front of you because you are so busy photographing.”
Much as I love my wife, I agreed with her daughter. She isn’t seeing; she is recording. All of us secretly feel that photographers are more interested in photographing than seeing. They aren’t seeing what is right in front of them.
Perhaps in self defense, I have begun taking pictures. After all, I’m just hanging around, waiting for her to stop taking pictures. It does get boring at times. I can’t move on until she is ready to move on -- and suddenly I have begun seeing as photographers see: I see everything as a possible picture. I frame every scene before me.
Am I seeing more than I saw before? I am not sure, but I see differently, and I suddenly see that indeed photographers do see, perhaps they even see more than those of us who do not take photographs.
I do not want to compare photographers and non-photographers. We are not competing, each of us is seeing the scene before us. One looks hard to create a mental record, the other looks hard to create a physical record -- a photographic journal of events, a visual notebook that, later in life, one can go back to.
Though I am not comparing, I am beginning to see what photographers see and I am here to defend the behavior of those who do take photographs: they are a maligned group, a group that intellectuals malign: you can’t be seeing what is in front of you. You are too busy taking a photograph to truly see.
Not only do they see, one could say they see more than the rest of us see.
Because modern cameras are so powerful, so detailed, so brilliantly clear, we sometimes get home and see what we did not know we were looking at.
She photographed a beautiful early morning scene outside the cabin window of our boat. When we met others on the boat, they asked us if we had seen the hot air balloons that morning. Both of us said we didn’t see any hot air balloons -- but we went back to look at the pictures she took -- and there they were, hot air balloons. Neither of us had seen the balloons, but there they were, in the photograph.
The preceding is only one small example of a phenomenon we have begun to notice. Time after time we get back home, she scans her photographs, and there are details that escaped the human eye. The human eye can take in a scene in a way no camera can capture, but the human eye misses certain details. The camera sees every detail, and with modern technology, the computer, she can blow up pictures, focus on just one small corner of a large picture, and suddenly we see what we had not seen before. The camera makes one see. The camera can capture what the human eye has not been able to truly see, because the human eye cannot hold a picture forever, cannot blow up a corner of a scene, cannot zoom in, capture details the human eye is incapable of seeing things that are small, far away.
Again, I do not mean to glorify one group at the expense of another group: those who do not take photographs see a great deal -- but photographers also see the scene before them, they just see it differently, as a possible photograph, and they have the wonderful added advantage of seeing even more later, in the quiet of their home, with the aid of the all powerful computer that allows one to zoom in, blow up, see details. So long…
Copyright © 2008 Henry Morgenstein