A Whiter White
Winter scene as if viewed through cataracts (above Some years ago my eye doctor told me I was developing cataracts. He said it almost in passing, assuring me the condition was not uncommon for someone my age. The symptoms were slow to progress. Still, I was surprised. I was familiar with Claude Monet’s struggles to continue painting as cataracts clouded his vision. You can actually see evidence of his condition in his iconic paintings of water lilies. The colors are muddier and the brush strokes less distinct than in his earlier work. My own vision gradually grew cloudy, but there was none of the yellowish tint that cataract patients normally report – or at least so it appeared until I had my cataracts removed. Cataract surgery is performed on each eye in turn, spaced several weeks apart. During that in-between period, I wore my old glasses with one lens removed, since the ophthalmologist had also corrected an astigmatism in my right eye. I could now see clearly at a distance out of that eye but not out of the other one. A week or so after my first surgery, I happened to look out my bedroom window. Snow had fallen during the night, and I noticed a small but distinct yellowish tint to the snow through my uncorrected left eye but not through my right. How had I failed to see this before? As a photographer, I depend not only on visual acuity but also color discrimination in my work. Color correction is normally part of the post-production process, using Photoshop or similar software. The first step is usually to adjust the white balance so that white objects in an image are truly white. If you shoot indoors, the camera will record a yellowish cast from incandescent lighting or a bluish cast from fluorescent fixtures. You can adjust for this during color correction so the image appears more natural. One of the oddities of human vision is that it will automatically adjust for changes in lighting to make sure white objects always appear white – a phenomenon that cognitive psychologists refer to as “color constancy.” However, a camera will dutifully record the colors as they actually are, requiring adjustments in the color balance so the image appears the way the eye sees the scene. As I discovered, the eye’s internal color correction mechanism also counteracts any changes caused by cataracts to assure that snow always appears white, not pale yellow. Clearly, color is not an exclusive property of the objects we perceive in the world, as Galileo believed. But neither is it necessarily in the eye of the beholder; otherwise, I would have seen yellow snow through my cataracts. I can only conclude the color palette I apply to the world resides in my mind’s eye, the part of my brain that determines what the colors should be and paints things accordingly. Snow, for example, is supposed to be white, so my brain finds a match with my internal image of snow, kind of like comparing color swatches at the paint store. Where do those mental color swatches come from? Physiologically, the human eye is capable of perceiving millions of shades of color. But what do we actually see? Recent research suggests that color discrimination may be determined in part by language and culture. For example, the English language has 11 basic color words (red, green, blue, etc.), while the Himba people of Namibia have only five, each term covering a broader range on the color spectrum. Meanwhile, the language spoken by the Candoshi tribe on the upper Amazon River has no color words at all, not even a concept of color as such. This despite the fact the Candoshi spend much of their time making brightly colored dyes and pigments for pottery and face paints. The recent findings on color discrimination among different cultures tend to validate a disputed theory put forward by linguist Benjamin Whorf, who argued that language determines to a significant degree what we think and how we see the world. His study of Native American languages suggested that indigenous peoples interpreted the world in ways that were radically different from Western cultures, including their basic understanding of time and space. "The world is presented in a kaleidoscopic flux of impressions which has to be organized by our minds -- and this means largely by the linguistic systems in our minds," Whorf wrote in Language, Thought and Reality (1956). "We cut nature up, organize it in this way, largely because we are parties to an agreement to organize it in this way -- an agreement that holds throughout our speech community and is codified in the patterns of our language." As it happens, one of the examples Whorf used was snow, which is denoted with a single word in English and multiple words in the Eskimo language, enabling Eskimos to make much finer distinctions when discussing the white stuff. Critics challenged Whorf’s conclusions, and his theory had long fallen out of favor. But now the new research on color discrimination has breathed new life into the idea that language shapes perception. In effect, we don’t just put words to the things we see, we see what we have words for. And if we only see the colors we can name, what else aren’t we seeing?
Attention on Eternity
"Illuminated Tiger Lily Duo 7" by Eric Rennie “Something is wrong, I know it, if I don’t keep my attention on eternity.” So wrote the late poet Mary Oliver. It was the kind of high-minded statement we might expect of a poet, except I don’t think she meant it that way at all. We normally think of eternity as the hereafter or as some faraway realm beyond time and space. But I think what Oliver was getting at was more nearly the opposite. We need to pay attention to what is happening right here and right now, not to our thoughts about what happened before or what might happen in the future. When we give our attention wholly to what is happening in the present moment, there is no past or future. The word “eternity” comes from a Latin root meaning “without beginning or end.” We have a tough time conceiving of such a thing, so we assume that if it exists at all, it must be located somewhere outside our own experience. We have trouble conceiving of it because time is literally embedded in the grammar of our thoughts. We can’t think about anything without placing it in past, present or future. Of these three, the present moment is the most elusive, a fleeting stop between past and future. We can’t even lay hold of it before it has slipped through our grasp into the past. And yet it is all tangibly that we have. The past exists only in memory; the future is nothing more than expectation. Both are mere thoughts. Oliver didn’t say she had to keep her thoughts on eternity, because eternity can never be contained by any thought. It can be apprehended only by paying absolute attention to what is happening right now. As the philosopher George Santayana once expressed it, "The essence of nowness runs like fire along the fuse of time." Nowness – the present moment – has no duration by definition and yet it goes on forever, without beginning or end. It is the essence of eternity · Poets like Mary Oliver find truth not in lofty things but in small things – in the words of William Blake, To see a World in a Grain of Sand Photographers like me are similarly focused on what is immediately at hand. We are miniaturists, selecting from the vast dome of the world the small rectangle of light that will become our image. If we are lucky, that small thing we capture on film or on a computer disk will illuminate the truth. “By doing something half a centimeter high, you are more likely to get a sense of the universe than if you try to do the whole sky,” said the sculptor Alberto Giacometti. In recent years I have been coming back from my daily walks with wildflowers I have picked by the side of the road. I photograph them indoors against a black backdrop under a single cone of white light. I use a macro lens that allows me to get close, real close, sometimes only inches from my subject. I now understand what the painter Georgia O’Keeffe meant when she said she painted flowers big so people would have to take the time to look at them. I admit I was one of those who rarely took the time to look at them. I can’t even name half the flowers I bring back from my walks and have to look them up. But once I get in really close, I am astonished by their intricate beauty. God is indeed in the details. Attention is the key. “Attention, taken to its highest degree, is the same thing as prayer,” said the Christian mystic and philosopher Simone Weil. She was speaking here not of prayers you recite but contemplative prayer, which is wordless. “Attention consists in suspending thought, in leaving it available, empty and subject to penetration by the object,” she wrote. She added that “thought must remain empty, awaiting, not seeking anything, but ready to receive in its naked truth the object that will penetrate it.” For a photographer, that is precisely the moment when you snap the picture. More Light!
Goethe's Final Words? The impressively named German polymath Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749 – 1832), perhaps best known as the author of Faust, is also famous for dying words he probably never spoke – or at least not in so few words. “More light!” he is said to have said on his deathbed. Except that he wasn’t technically on his deathbed; he was sitting up in a chair, fully clothed. But no matter. Goethe’s long fascination with light makes his final utterance particularly apropos; indeed, he wrote a scientific treatise on the subject that he regarded as his most important work. He reportedly spent the last evening of his life discussing optical phenomena with his daughter-in-law. Was the light failing him at the approach of death, or was it simply too dark in his room? The truth, apparently, is closer to the latter, rather than his making some metaphysical statement about the dying of the light. According to some accounts, his actual final words were, "Open the second shutter so that more light may come in." We can’t help but be a little disappointed with the truth of the matter, assuming that the unedited original is any more reliable than the romanticized version commonly attributed to the Olympian Goethe. Disappointment is not too strong a word for photographers and other visual artists whose stock-in-trade is light. We might like to imagine that Goethe had ridden out on a beam of celestial light, much as he had arrived. By his own account, he was nearly stillborn through the ineptitude of a midwife. In his four-volume autobiography he wrote, “I came into the world as dead; and only after various efforts was I enabled to see the light.” Scientific treatises aside, we are hardly more capable of comprehending light than a fish is capable of comprehending water. Of course, the world is full of light, and we are immersed in it. Everyone who sees can imagine what it is like not to see; all we have to do is close our eyes. But how would we explain light to someone who has never seen? What words can convey its essence, which has no real correspondence to anything other than itself? We know it when we see it, but that’s about all we can say. Goethe’s abridged final words resonate with God’s first words, as set down in the biblical creation story. “Let there be light,” the Lord is said to have said in the English translation of the Book of Genesis. In Hebrew, the words were more commanding, closer to Goethe’s “More light!” – except, of course, there was no need to say “more,” since up to that point there hadn’t been any at all. Before God turned on the lights, there was not nothing; rather, “the earth was without form, and void; and·darkness was upon the face of the deep.” So the first act of creation on Day One was not to conjure up something out of thin air but to illuminate what was already there, even if it was still formless. The scientific account of creation is not markedly different, all things considered. It also begins with a burst of light from what scientists call the Big Bang, an immense explosion of superheated plasma that eventually congealed into galaxies, stars and planets. However, the six days of creation described in Genesis played out over billions of years. And for most that time, there was not one single sentient being, whether here or elsewhere, that was around to see the light. Which raises this question: Does the light shine if there is no one (or nothing) to see it? Certainly, there would have been natural phenomena emitting radiation within a range that we now associate with the visible spectrum. But for all that time darkness still moved upon the face of the deep because there were no organisms equipped with even the most rudimentary photoreceptor cells to register the light. The word “luminous” comes from the Latin lumen, meaning both “light” and “eye.” This may be our clue to whether light can shine when there is no one to see. The question is essentially meaningless, because light and the eye are synonymous. The universe may have existed in the dark for billions of years, but the world we know begins and ends with light, as it did for Goethe. The world we know is known primarily through the light that shines upon it, which may explain why we always want more.
Single Vision
We see the world as if we were looking through the lens of a camera. In the viewfinder of the digital camera I use for most of my fine arts work, the world appears inside a black rectangle, as if in the darkened theater of my mind. If I press the shutter down half way, a light meter appears across the bottom of my field of vision. There are markings on the screen to aid in focusing the camera. When I press the shutter, light passing though the lens strikes a digital sensor that converts patterns of color and brightness into pixels that are stored as a long string of zeros and ones on a memory card – a paint-by-numbers process in the most literal sense. The object I photograph now exists twice: once “out there” in the world and once as a digital image stored in my camera. We imagine that the mind works more or less the same way, capturing a representation of the world apprehended through the senses and storing it in memory. As much as a camera might appear to approximate how human consciousness works, the real world doesn’t actually operate that way. This became apparent when quantum physicists reported early in the last century that subatomic realm does not exist independently of an observer but is fundamentally altered by any observation of it. They discovered that elementary particles exist in an indeterminate state – neither particle nor wave -- until they are measured – a phenomenon that physicists refer to as the “observer effect.” The implications for the scientific method could no be more profound, since we normally presume the experimenter is not part of the experiment. How do you get an unbiased measurement of the natural world if your thumb is always on the scale? Independently of quantum theory, English philosopher Owen Barfield was grappling with some of the same issues and concluded we are deluded in thinking “the mind of man is a passive onlooker at the processes and phenomena of nature.” He theorized that human consciousness is evolving and has reached a stage he called “camera civilization.” Like the workings of a camera, we believe “the mind is something which is shut up in a sort of box called the brain” – a “mere recorder of an external world, not a participant in its creative life.” When I look through the viewfinder of my camera, it is easy to objectify what I see through the lens. The world exists “out there,” and I am in here looking not at the world itself but at an image of the world captured on my camera. In effect, there is not one world but two – or three, if you count the image in my mind’s eye. However, quantum physicists would tell us there is no real boundary between what we normally think of as the exterior world and the interior world of thoughts and perceptions. “The world is given to me only once, not one existing and one perceived,” wrote physicist Erwin Schrödinger. “Subject and object are only one.” All the world’s a stage, Shakespeare wrote. But the stage is not in the world; it’s in the mind. And the mind we are talking about here is not the little box camera we call the brain. It is one mind, not many, a single consciousness that encompasses all the world and everything in it, including all we poor players who strut and fret our hour upon the stage. As Schrödinger put it, “There is no kind of framework within which we can find consciousness in the plural; this is simply something we construct because of the temporal plurality of individuals, but it is a false construction.” In reality, there in no “out there” in the world, no “in here” within me; it is all in the mind of God.
A Thousand Words
"Trolley -- New Orleans" by Robert Frank Swiss-born photographer Robert Frank has died at 94. His iconic book, The Americans, had trouble finding a U.S. publisher at first because he saw his adopted country in a way that native Americans during the Eisenhower era were not yet prepared to see themselves. For example, this photo of a New Orleans trolley, taken in 1955, speaks volumes at a time when Jim Crow laws down South still required non-whites to sit in the back of public conveyances. (This photo was taken a few weeks before Rosa Parks was arrested for refusing to give up her seat to a white person on a bus in Montgomery, AL.) Decades later, Franks recalled, “One became aware of white cities, black people, no money, no hope. The noise. The violence. How brutal people were. A brutal country.” Frank is now recognized as a giant of 20th-century photography. |
