How to stop seeing what isn’t there
I am sure this is obvious to many of you, but perhaps not to everyone. I have spent the weekend teaching a course on Colour and Design. There are many aspects of the course, but I’m going to talk about one, as it is an approach to looking that can be taught. It might seem funny to think of looking as something that needs to be taught, but students often see what they ‘know’, rather than what is actually there. I’m sure this is common in many disciplines. I imagine scientific experiments need to shed assumptions that might be read as part of objective data. In any case students often do need to be taught to look, and most particularly, need to be taught how to stop seeing what isn’t there. In order to understand what I am talking about, look at this photograph.
This is a picture of my cat by the photographer Louise Haywood-Shiefer. The appeal of the image really comes from the blast of contrast — the black and white of the cat, and the band of brilliant colour given by the mosaic tiles on the left. The colour of the photograph is very reduced and keyed to white. The white of the cat almost fuses with the white of the background, and it is this that boosts the intensity of her gaze, adds brilliance to the green of her eyes, and increases a sense of the tender pink of her nose. The image is recogniseable, but what you are seeing is a photographic stylisation — the photographer has used the camera to see some things and to exclude others.
I have to teach students that image making is about selection, and about making the selected elements seem to lock together. I can imagine a student — not because any student has ever done it with this image, but because people see in this way all the time — finding this image attractive, and wanting to reproduce it. And my imaginary student might observe that you can see a house through the window. And because the house has yellow bricks, I can imagine them being included, not because they can see them in the image, but because the student knows they are there. And suddenly the balance of the whole image is utterly thrown, and one clarification of the photograph seems to require another, and on and on until the entire image, with its strange white atmosphere, has entirely vanished, and a new colourful world has appeared, one in which the cat is much less ghostly and gripping.
For more fascinating lessons like this, you will have to buy the book Sonia King and I are writing, when we have finished writing it — which will definitely be soon!
Excellent explantion of seeing versus “knowing.” It’s often hard to explain that what you “know” is often irrelevant in design and execution – and can be detrimental to the whole of your piece!
Well done.