Seeing what is right in front of you
The visual language of our daily experiences.
Starting on my birthday in 2015, I committed to posting a photo a day on Instagram, for an entire year ending on my birthday a year later. The rules were simple, it had to be taken that day with my iPhone 6, and could be cropped, adjusted and filters applied. I was successful, ending up with 366 images of just about everything you could think of, and from many different locations. There were days when I took many images, to get the right one worthy of posting. As an artist and designer, I’m normally looking at everything, but this made me look even closer with intent.
Beauty is everywhere and in everything. I want to encourage everyone to open their eyes and see all the interesting things around and in front of them. Beauty both manmade and in nature. The challenge to find something interesting every day, worthy of a post, wasn’t easy at times but a great goal to keep me engaged. Something I could complete each day as part of a larger initiative. I’ve spent a lifetime looking and taking photos on trips, for projects, or documentation. Since I completed the project I find myself looking more, and composing in my mind’s eye constantly. I still post but not every day. I’ve become fond of posting batches of images, sometimes up to the limit of 10, especially while on trips, as I did last year in Europe.
I created a book “Seeing what is right in front of you” with all 366 images. The ebook is available here, the printed version here and the screensaver here.
Seeing
When I talk about ‘seeing’, what exactly do I mean? The best way I can describe it is like this; “training one’s self to be aware of the simple delights found in details and serendipitous moments that play out in front of us every day.” When outside, look up. Clouds are endlessly interesting, so are buildings, power lines and trees. Look down, sidewalks and roads, paths and fields can be a gold mine of small and interesting juxtapositions. And that is what can be most interesting, the play between things, shapes and contrasts, color and shadows, are thing I focus on a lot. Composing and framing comes naturally to me so it is hard to describe, but I think people can learn by looking at what others are doing in their photography, and see if they can find similar opportunities. I have found interesting compositions in everything imaginable. Whether discarded trash, painted over graffiti, or the profound beauty of flowers. I have a friend that is a great street photographer who prefers black and white, and finds the most amazing and striking compositions in the simplest everyday circumstances. As I mentioned, shadows are a great place to start, to notice interesting patterns and their dance on surfaces. This is something you can find anywhere at any moment in any light.
Visual Reading
The book ”How to See / Visual adventures in a world God never made” by George Nelson, 1977, was a seminal book on this very topic. He has always been an inspiration, not only for this lesson in visual literacy, but for his design work, with the Eames’ and Herman Miller.
“Seeing, then, is also dependent on the value system of the observer.”
George Nelson
George talks about the ability to read objects by anyone capable of seeing what they are looking at. The messages come in all levels of meaning, which are different for various observers. The seeing is always conditioned, but at the same time it is uniquely personal and private. He focuses on the ugliness and disorder in our environments but admits to his personal bias in seeing things this way. He even says a more concrete title would be ‘How I See’. As a textbook on visual literacy, ‘How to See’ is divided into chapters including topics like Art, Old Stuff and City. Within the 8 sections he breaks things down further to focus on very specific topics as within ‘City’ there is a spread on the ‘Great American street corner’.
“The unifying theme behind all of Nelson’s lectures — and, indeed, behind his life’s work — was a simple and optimistic one: that by seeing more clearly, one could make better, more thoughtful and ultimately more humane choices about our manmade environment , that world God never made.”
Michael Bierut
Knowing
Another person thinking about these things around the same time was John Berger. In his groundbreaking book “Ways of Seeing”, based on his BBC series, and published in 1972, he focuses on how we see and perceive art, but I think it can be applied to this discussion as well.
“Seeing comes before words. The child looks and recognizes before it can speak.”
John Berger
He says that the relationship between what we see and know is never settled, the knowledge or explanation never quite fits. I have found this to be true as I search for interesting images or just experiencing a sunset or the fog rolling over the hills near my house. How we see things is affected in some ways by what we know and believe. The camera changed everything. It changed the way we saw things. Before photography paintings were a unique singular experience, many times made for the context they resided in. Photography influenced Impressionism, leading into Cubism eliminating a single point of view, and context traditionally found in paintings.
A new experience
Charles and Ray Eames have also been a major influence and model, for documentation of objects and locations. They left behind a massive archive of images from Charles’ constant image gathering. In the book “Connections, the work of Charles and Ray Eames” there is this wonderful grid of images from their office just called ‘photographic notes’. It perfectly sums up the methodical documentation of everything. In the recent exhibition at the Oakland Museum of California, ‘The world of Charles and Ray Eames’ there was a display where you could look through hundreds of the Eames’ slides on light tables using loupes.
In 1970 Charles Eames was appointed the Charles Eliot Norton Professor of Poetry at Harvard. He would go on to deliver a series of 6 lectures. The topic was “Problems relating to visual communications and the visual environment”. He relied heavily on his slide shows utilizing his vast collection of images covering a wide range of subjects that he had spent years refining. Everything from the Circus, the Louvre, Goods and Eero Saarinen. Charles was a pioneer in the use of multi-projector slideshows and film presentations, which could be quite elaborate. One example, was in 1959 working with George Nelson on Glimpses of the U.S.A. at the American National Exhibition in Moscow. He was hired to do shows at World’s fairs and pavilions, creating a new multi-media approach that would be a major influence on giving people new experiences of seeing.
In recent years photography has changed again with the advent of smartphones. The iPhone revolutionized the way we approach our daily lives and image making. For the first time ever on my trip to Europe last year I didn’t take my DSLR, only my phone. I could travel lighter, and more easily document inside museums and instantly post to Instagram. I still love my DSLR and what those lenses and formats can provide, but with the advancement of the camera-phones I am enjoying new possibilities. I’ve rediscovered black and white photograpny because of the built in filters, and third party photo apps, including the amazing Filmic Pro for shooting video.
Our world and our lives are saturated with images daily but I still believe in everyone expressing their endless fascination with the world around them, and sharing it with the rest of us.
