A retired colleague and friend is fond of saying “learn to see. Looking and Seeing are two different things.” He would then explain that looking is a task done for survival, like foraging for food. Seeing is what you need to create a photograph.
I think I have come to a slightly different distinction about seeing. Whereas looking is a survival instinct, seeing is about making meaning out of the observations. With photography, seeing is about interpreting the perceived world into an organized composition that transmit’s meaning that is either literal or ineffable. Literal meaning is practical like a photograph that illustrates step by step instructions and the ineffable meaning is just beyond words that are transcendent.
Seeing is also more than just awareness of what is being perceived. It is taking past experiences of looking and using those to predict what might be seen or composed in the camera. Ansel Adams is famously credited for articulating the importance of pre-visualization.
But how do we learn to see? How do we learn?
Learning begins with an awareness that there is something greater to be learned. The awareness of a greater knowledge is ultimately an awareness that I have a capacity to become more than I currently am. This triggers an inner conflict that only the acquisition of this new knowledge can sooth.
In a lecture by Dr. John Vervaeke about Neoplatonism and Cognitive Science he describes the two deepest human meta drives affect behavior Inner Peace and Truth. These two drives are interconnected. A person cannot have inner peace if they don’t have truth. Truth is Knowledge.
To solve this inner conflict a person must pursue knowledge through the process of learning.
For me, that first moment of deep inner conflict occurred right after college when I was doing photography with a dance company. I suddenly realized that the choreographer had a much deeper knowledge of composition and design than I did. His positioning of dancer’s bodies created imagery that was superior to the photographs I was making and this disturbed me deeply. I felt like I was the emperor without close from the childhood storybook!
The motivation to learn comes from the combination of an awareness of a lack of knowledge that stimulates inner conflict. The Oxford dictionary defines knowledge as facts, information, and skills acquired by a person through experience or education; the theoretical or practical understanding of a subject. Knowledge is the accumulation of truths about the world and our participation in it. The lack of inner peace triggers what has commonly referred to as a thirst for knowledge.
Unfortunately learning is not a simple process of identifying a need for knowledge and then seizing upon it. Learning also involves hard work to overcome procrastination and it involves hard work to obtain enough real world experiences to comprehend the knowledge and eventually embody it.
Inner peace doesn’t happen until we have internalized knowledge to the point of no longer consciously thinking about it. We see this in the work of master craftsmen who work intuitively within their medium.
The process of deep learning and acquiring knowledge is really difficult and can trigger bouts of procrastination or efforts to skip to the end or seek out the cliff’s notes version of information. This has led to the rise of Tik Tok and Youtube videos. Another friend of mine actually told me that she only watches video lectures if they are shorter than 10 minutes!
Thinking about this reminds me of a quote from Magnum photographer David Hurn who said:
“There is an analogy which I like to use: When I landscaped my garden I needed to plant trees. I could have obtained an instant tree by collecting an assortment of trunks, branches, twigs and leaves and assembling the bits. But the tree would be dead; it would never grow into something else. So the starting point was a sapling, which, by careful nurturing, and a good deal of patience, will grow into a tree, often into a form which could not have been predicted. It seems to me that it is the same with a body of work, of any merit, in photography. The greatest scope for deep-rooted, organic growth begins with the simplest of premises: the direct visual encounter with a selected subject.”
Deep learning takes a long time and hard effort. Real achievement comes through long term sustained effort. Malcom Gladwell popularized the term 10,000 hour rule to describe the importance of effort over time.
Recently I set aside time to do some deep learning about seeing and art. I finished reading the biography Foursome: Alfred Stieglitz, Georgia O’Keeffe, Paul Strand, Rebecca Salsbury by Carolyn Burke while on a sailing trip in the San Juan Islands for a week. Being unplugged from my normal world gave me the space to immerse myself without distraction.
I’ll be honest and tell you that I found this book to be extremely tedious because it spent so much time quoting from the personal letters of each of the artist which often contained minutia that I found frustrating. I also found myself confronted with characteristics in each of these artist that I both admired and abhorred. I wanted the overview and outline of the information and did not want to be drawn into the weeds of their lives.
I kept at it by chipping away in small does. I read a single chapter every morning and sat with it. I wrestled with my own inner dialogue as I reflected on the content and I would engage with conversation over coffee with my wife. Talking about the material helped me appreciate it.
By the end of the book I had some insight that I felt was hard won from the extensive and tedious effort. I felt I had achieved a new level of knowledge that I could bring into my own artistic practice.
The book didn’t provide everything I learned. I was only ready for the book to help me from years of prior learning experiences. The book just locked in the final puzzle pieces for a problem that had been started within me more than 30 years ago.
What I found so interesting throughout this learning process was the way that some of the material confirmed what I had already felt I knew about composition and design from my own experiences of trial and error. There was a recognition of an appropriate precursor knowledge that enabled me to go deeper and into new territories of exploration.
From Stieglitz I could see a single thread line of the importance of seeing and organizing the physical world into compositions that could reflect back a deeper truth that elevates the human into a spiritual awareness. I could appreciate the importance of his work of bringing awareness of the modern abstract artist as these were compositions that could render the world with clarity that sees through the infinite and reduces it down to a purity of meaning and expression. While I have always appreciated cubism and expressionism for it’s ability to simplify and organize and enhance emotional expression, reading the actual discourse about these issues cemented the ideas within me while also inspiring new insights that I am still grappling with.
In many ways Stieglitz epitomizes the teacher whose knowledge facilitates students to exceed their achievements. Teaching is like passing the baton in a relay race who will be the one to actually win the race.
I appreciated the process Rebecca Salsbury went through to become an artist in her own right. The struggle is real. I really appreciated the strength of character that Georgia O’Keeffe possessed along with her willingness to share her vulnerability and intimacy. But as a photographer I tended to focus most closely on the progression and relationship between Paul Strand and Alfred Stieglitz which could be summarized as the convergence of how to see and then the divergence into two separate schools of thought on art. Stieglitz stayed true to the idea of art for arts sake while Strand could not ignore the importance of art as cultural criticism and instrumentalism.
Stieglitz attempted to convey pure emotion through his study of clouds while Strand pursued the harsher realities of social documentary photography and cinematography. They represent a kind of yin and yang that is held together by the ability to interpret the physical world through formal composition.
In both of these photographers I see Plato’s ideas about Truth, Beauty, and Justice. Both are seekers of wisdom with a goal of creating images that stimulate contemplation.
The idea of creating art about wisdom for the purposes of contemplation aligns with my own efforts. I keep having experiences that tell me that in order to go farther ahead in my work I must dig deeper into the ideas of the past. The philosophy of Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, and Plotinus among others form the basis from which new ideas can emerge. I have often reflected on the way in which photography is the merging of philosophy and psychology into art.
In my pursuit of learning to see I have studied Western and Eastern art. These learning experiences have formed the cumulative effect of allowing me to pre-visualize the image I am sharing today.
Sarah and I sailed to Sucia Island and moored the boat in Echo Bay. The next day we took the dinghy ashore and hiked over to Fox Cove where I observed a blue heron feeding at low tide. I became extremely excited because this was an image I had imagined in my mind for many years but had never put myself into position to make. I observed the heron slowly moving back and forth and I moved laterally side to side to keep the heron directly in alignment with Patos island in the horizon. I also was able to instantly react to the sound of Ravens flying across the frame. I made many photographs over the course of 40 minutes until I was sure I had what I needed to create the final image I had been holding in my mind.
While I did make a single frame that captured the heron and the ravens together, I was not satisfied with the shape of the heron’s neck. Often the heron was standing with its neck in a vertical line. I think the high head placement gave the bird a vantage point to scan the water for fish. When the heron was poised to strike the neck would become curved which I found so beautiful. In order to make the image I wanted I ultimately chose to combine three images together into a single frame that articulated my very real experience of observing the heron and ravens in this particular location.