Ways of seeing

What you see depends on how you look.

Our astronomer was musing on something he noticed last August, during the solar eclipse.  It wasn’t total at our tutoring location in Fairfax, Virginia, but he’d still brought out a small telescope to show people what there was to see, as we’ve mentioned.  But some people weren’t able to see anything through the telescope.  They’d put their eye up to the eyepiece like everyone else, but complained that there was nothing there.  It’s not the first time that sort of thing had happened; at star parties over the years there were often people who saw nothing, while others had no trouble.

He has a new idea: those who didn’t see what the telescope was pointed at were trying to see something in the telescope, as if a smartphone screen were just inside the eyepeice.  Focusing close at hand, they hadn’t managed to look through the instrument to what it was pointed at.  It does take some practice to use optics like binoculars handily, we’ve noticed, and this might be a similar thing.  It’s not intuitive to tell your eyes to look away at infinity when you’re bringing something right up close, and juggling the normal scene with a magnified view takes some getting used to.  Perhaps, with the rise of the smartphone, we’re less used to looking through an instrument than we used to be.

Our photographer agreed at once.  Once he had been very used to a single-lens reflex camera, in which one looks through the viewfinder at the scene.  Then he started using a different model in which the view through the lens was projected on a ground-glass screen, a sort of living picture close at hand (shown in the picture above).  He found himself taking a subtly different kind of photograph, paying more attention to the composition of large shapes as they appeared on his ground-glass and less on the details and the reality of the scene.  This is nothing new; the seduction of the ground-glass image, so lifelike and brilliant, is well-known among large-format photographers.  It has has led to untold numbers of photographs that just aren’t as interesting as they promised to be.  (As well, it has led to untold other numbers of photographs that are successful through careful composition.)  It’s just one example of the interaction between a craftsman or artist and the tools each uses, as we’ve said before.  We’ve also commented on how one looks affects what one sees.

But then our photographer (who has been hanging out with artists, so this is probably not his fault) extended this idea.  Consider a photograph by an art-photographer; certainly it’s something to look at.  But it is also something to look through.  It has some meaning, points to some idea beyond the literal scene.  That may be (he said) the definition of Art.

That’s far outside our claimed expertise, so we won’t press the idea too far.  But it’s a question worth asking: when are you looking at, and when are you looking through?  Can changing your focus bring you a new insight?