"Scrollwork" by Eric Rennie

I used to try to figure out precisely what I was seeing all the time, until
I discovered I didn't need to. If the thing is there, why, there it is.
                             -- Walker Evans

I was in a sitting room recently outside a small chapel next to the main sanctuary of the church I attend.  I glanced over at the tall window on my left as I was passing through and was struck by the morning light streaming through a lace curtain.  It was all enfolded scrollwork in pale ivory, casting intricate shadows on the sloping sill beneath.  I reached into my shoulder bag for my camera and began snapping pictures. 

Had you asked me at that moment what caught my eye, I would, of course, have been able to answer in so many words, much as I am doing now.  But there really were no words for what caused me to reach for my camera, because the impulse was entirely visual.  I am reminded of a passage in Annie Dillard’s Pilgrim at Tinker Creek in which she describes the reaction of people who had been blind from birth and later received their sight as a result of pioneering cataract surgery in the 19th century.  “For the newly sighted,” Dillard writes, “vision is pure sensation unencumbered by meaning.”  The world for them is a “dazzle of color patches” without any sense of form, size or distance.   You might say I was dazzled by color patches on my way through the sitting room that morning.

Often when I return from a photo expedition, my wife will ask me right away if I got any good pictures, and I never know how to answer.  I know what I saw, but that is no guarantee I got a good picture.  I have to see the results on my computer first, and even then there is usually much work to be done before I know for sure.  The camera I had with me that morning was not the one I normally would have used for a still life, and a tripod would have come in handy to steady the shot.  I took fewer than half a dozen shots of the lace-curtain window, both horizontal and vertical.  Once I had a chance to see the images on my computer, I selected one of the verticals and went to work using Photoshop and various add-ons.  I did some cropping and aligned the edge of the windowsill to the bottom of the frame.  I made some adjustments in contrast and lightened one of the folds so it was more uniform with the others.  The photograph overall was slightly lighter in tone than the original to accentuate the translucence of the curtain material.  My most significant modification was to realign the fold on the right edge of the picture so it hung straight down rather than veering off to the upper right, which would have created a slight imbalance in the finished work.  As a final step, I did a little digital sharpening, even though the image was already in focus.
  
Some people think you are falsifying an image by altering it in any significant way, and that might be true if I were documenting a crime scene rather than creating a work of art.  My intention was to recapture my experience glimpsing that lace-curtain window on my way through the sitting room that morning.  And if I were halfway successful in this undertaking, perhaps I can get you to see what I saw, as if we were newly sighted and seeing the world for the first time.

A squared-off version of the image above is one of 18 works on display from November 27, 2015 through December 31, 2015 at the Midwest Center for Photography in Wichita, KS in an exhibit entitled Ten X Ten.  Each photograph is ten inches by ten inches and sells for $100.  

"Tickets" by Eric Rennie

My photograph "Tickets" is among 60 images appearing in an exhibition of night photography opening on Halloween at the 1650 Gallery in Los Angeles. The juror is gallery owner Andrew Overtoom, an L.A. filmmaker and photographer. The picture was taken at a local carnival seven years ago, when taking technically proficient pictures was still a hit-or-miss affair for me (it's still a hit-or-miss affair!)

William Gillette as Sherlock Holmes

William Gillette as Sherlock Holmes

“You see, but you do not observe,” Sherlock Holmes scolded Dr. Watson in A. Conan Doyle’s “A Scandal in Bohemia.”  He added, “The distinction is clear.”  Indeed it is, although it still matters what you are looking for.  To prove his point, Holmes had asked Watson how many steps led up to their apartment at 221B Baker Street, which Watson was unable to answer. “Now, I know that there are seventeen steps, because I have both seen and observed,” Holmes continued.  He did not bother to explain why he had counted the steps to their apartment, leaving one to suspect that his “extraordinary genius for minutiae,” as Watson characterized it, might have been symptomatic of Aspergers Syndrome or something similar.  Holmes was determined to keep his mind uncluttered by anything but “the tools which may help him in doing his work,” which explains why he was so shockingly ignorant of literature, philosophy and politics.  And so, while he might both see and observe things that most people didn’t bother to notice, Holmes only took in what might help him solve crimes.

Visual artists depend on their powers of observation no less than Sherlock Holmes, although they are presumably not so concerned with footprints, watermarks and tobacco residue, the minutiae of Holmes’ trade.  The tools of their trade are light, form, texture and balance, but not in the abstract.  They are as particular in their way as Holmes was in his, but not to catalog or to classify.  Theirs is a world without names, a world of pure sensation.  They observe what is there for all to see but that remains unobserved because people are usually looking for something else.

When I go about my daily rounds, I can be as oblivious of my surroundings as the next person.  But put a camera in my hands, and suddenly I am seeing the world with new eyes.  “The camera is an instrument that teaches people how to see without a camera,” Dorothea Langue once said.  I found this to be literally true in my case, and eventually I figured out why.  To look through the viewfinder of a camera is to see the world with a frame around it.  It’s as simple as that.  Actually, it is no longer the world I see but pieces of it: shapes, patterns, colors, the play of light and shadow on a wall, all within the camera’s frame.  I mostly work with a zoom lens, so I am moving the frame in an out, bringing the elements into balance, composing a picture.  Mostly I am operating on instinct or whatever you call it when the visual cortex has taken charge.  I never think, “This will make a great picture” – at least not in words.  Who was it that said words are slayers of the real?  As Wittgenstein kept telling his colleagues, “Don’t think, look.”

                 
Recently I read an interview with Quintan Ana Wikswo, a writer, photographer and performance artist who had just published a book of short stories entitled The Hope of Floating Has Carried Us This Far.  The collection was unusual for a work of literary fiction because it also contained some of her photographs, although not to illustrate the stories.  The book was even more unusual in its manner of creation.  Wikswo revealed that she suffered from temporal lobe epilepsy, and a seizure had for a time robbed her of the ability to process language.  “During the creation of the book, I wrote stories when my visual processing was impaired, and made photographs when I lost the capacity for language,” she told her interviewer.  Wikswo noted that immediately after her language ability disappeared, her perception of colors, shapes and patterns “came alive with ferocious intensity.”  Her visual experience was no longer filtered through the language center of her brain, so she was suddenly seeing the world as a newborn would, without names.

 
Normally, as Emerson wrote in one of his journal entries, “the world converts itself into that thing you name.”  There is a sound evolutionary purpose behind this.  Our Pleistocene ancestors did not want to be caught admiring the view when they should have been keeping a sharp eye out for predators.  Ferocious intensity is all well and good, but it needs to be channeled into the task at hand.  For Sherlock Holmes, that meant noticing the mud on a stranger’s trousers or the scratches on a watchcase.  But as for beauty, that was an entirely different matter.  There was the time, for example, when Watson commented on how attractive a young female client was in The Sign of Four. "Is she?” Holmes replied.  “I did not observe."