Gathering Storm Loveland, CO. ~ Winter 2010
Photography is a tool for dealing with things everybody knows about but isn’t attending to. My photographs are intended to represent something you don’t see.
Emmet Gowin
Photography, any visual art for that matter, but photography in particular is about learning to see. Everyone looks but not everyone sees. What is the difference? Looking is indiscriminate in the sense that looking takes in everything without attending to anything in particular. Seeing is the learned practice of attending, of paying close attention to not only what is present in its origins but, and this is most important, attending to what the photographic image will look like when finished. Seeing involves both the here and now and the ability to project to the finished product.
Learning to see is a process that requires patience, intuition, and a degree of talent in that order. If one is impatient no amount of practice will suffice to turn the corner from looking to seeing. Patience does not mean one does not get frustrated, rather, it suggests that frustration is a tool for learning, a part of the process of making images and is taken in stride. Intuition, especially at the beginning of the transitional process, is a tool that, when applied, tends to push the transition forward. Intuition is nothing more than experimenting with camera and subject, paying close attention to what one is doing and focusing on the results as a learning experience. It is helpful to have others critique your work at this stage as a way of challenging your intuition either confirming your choices or suggesting other ways to handle the same ideas. Finally talent, the least important element in the process. Yet without talent one stands little or no chance of ever developing photographic vision. Raw talent may be nurtured, developed, challenged to improve but without the raw elements in place there is little one can do to teach one to see.
The Gathering Storm Loveland, CO. ~ Winter 2010 by Roger Passman, unless otherwise expressly stated, is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License.
