I would never apologize for photographing rocks. Rocks can be very beautiful. But, yes, people have asked why I don’t put people into my pictures of the natural scene. I respond, “There are always two people in every picture: the photographer and the viewer.” That usually doesn’t go over at all.
I want to stay as close to the edge as I can without going over. Out on the edge you see all kinds of things you can't see from the center. Big, undreamed‑of things—the people on the edge see them first.
-Kurt Vonnegut, as quoted here
The real voyage of discovery lies not in seeking new landscapes but in seeing with new eyes.
Nowadays in the West we are, quite literally, corrupted by a lust to explain things. Our lust to explain things veils things. . . . Be true to your eyes, not to the desiderata of science or language.
-John Moriarty, Dreamtime
Technically speaking, you can look at any human life as the sum of a complex collection of chemical reactions, in much the same way as you can look at any beautiful painting as a simple collection of pigments, which is to say, you can miss the point of anything.
-Jarod K. Anderson, Something In The Woods Loves You
"Well-being depends less on objective events than on how those events are perceived, dealt with, and shared with others." This subjective layer is what we want to focus on in our quest to know other people. The crucial question is not "What happened to this person?" or "What are the items on their resume?" Instead we should ask: "How does this person interpret what happened? How does this person see things? How do they construct their reality?" This is what we really want to know if we want to understand another person.
An extrovert walks into a party and sees a different room then an introvert does. A person who has been trained as an interior designer sees a different room than someone who's been trained as a security specialist.
-David Brooks, How To Know A Person: The Art of Seeing Others Deeply and Being Deeply Seen
Lucky people are more relaxed and open, and therefore see what is there rather than just what they are looking for.
For example, there are people who earnestly believe that the phrase "I see what you mean" is ableist—that is, disrespectful and oppressive toward people with disabilities—because some people can't see. This is—and I choose the word carefully—nuts. It's nuts in several different dimensions all at once. Setting aside the unfortunate conflations inherent in the concept of ableism, which aggregates together conditions that have no business being aggregated together, this prohibition insults blind people, pretends to misunderstand the way language works, and is fundamentally unserious. It insults blind people and those with reduced vision because it assumes that they are incredibly sensitive and fragile, that if they come into contact with a perfectly common turn of phrase they've encountered their whole lives, they will be broken by it. As is true of so many contemporary progressive norms, this prohibition belittles and condescends to the very people it ostensibly honors. I have a disability myself, a mental illness. I am not hurt of offended by people using the word "crazy," because I am not so fragile as that and because I know how language works.
-Fredrik DeBoer, How the Elites Ate the Social Justice Movement
History is not always a very good guide to the way people felt about things when they happened. Nothing today would seem more expressive of health and well-being than such great Impressionist paintings as Manet's Bar at the Folies-Bergere or Renoir's Luncheon of the Boating Party or Monet's Terrace of Sainte-Adresse. Simply to look at these paintings makes one think of how agreeable life must have been at that time. But, in fact, when they were first exhibited, most people regarded them as immoral daubs—flashy, inept and practically incomprehensible—while those most qualified to judge regarded them, at best, as a repudiation of everything that mattered. To academicians art was a matter of trade secrets, and nature was manipulated according to fixed laws. The Impressionists, on the contrary , staked everything on the actual and previously unrecorded look of things. As the name suggests, they saw the world in terms of instantaneous impressions that were to be set down as truthfully as possible.
-John Russell, Time-Life Library, The World of Matisse 1869-1954
 |
| Édouard Manet oil on canvas 1882 Un bar aux Folies Bergère |
 |
| Pierre-Auguste Renoir Oil on Canvas 1881 Le Déjeuner des canotiers |
 |
| Claude Monet Oil on Canvas 1867 Terrasse à Sainte-Adresse |
In order to observe the movement of your own mind and heart, of your whole being, you must have a free mind, not a mind that agrees and disagrees, taking sides in an argument, disputing over mere words, but rather following with an intention to understand—a very difficult thing to do because most of us don't know how to look at, or listen to, our own being any more than we know how to look at the beauty of a river or listen to the breeze among the trees.
When we condemn or justify we cannot see clearly, nor can we when our minds are endlessly chattering; then we do not observe what is; we look only at the projections of what we think we are or what we should be, and that image, that picture, entirely prevents us from seeing ourselves as we actually are.
-J. Krishnamurti, Freedom from the Known
...............................Juneau, Alaska:
The capital city of Alaska is an interesting place. Geographically, it is larger than the State of Rhode Island. Population-wise, it is smaller (32,000+) than Newark, Ohio. Not accessible by road, you can only get to Juneau by boat, plane, or being born there. A major stop for the cruise ships, a significant part of the town is dedicated to tourists. Our tour guide pointed to the capital building, "the one with flags on top", but it took a while to find it. A mere 12 miles from downtown Juneau is the Mendenhall glacier and Nugget Falls. Well worth the morning trip. During the afternoon we went whale-watching. We saw humpbacks surface and use their blowholes. Watching them use their tail flukes to dive was pretty cool.
 |
| Arriving in Juneau |
 |
| As advertised |
 |
| It borders on Canada, but is long way to anywhere else |
 |
| I suspect they didn't pay a lot for the archicture |
 |
| Panorama from the cruise ship |
 |
| The Mendenhall glacier |
 |
| Ditto |
 |
| Nugget Falls at Mendenhall |
 |
| One amazing traveling companion |
 |
| A calving from Mendenhall glacier |
 |
| Hunting whales |
 |
| Thar she blows! |
 |
| Leaving Juneau after a full day |
So, art is saying Stop. It helps us to stop by putting a frame around something and makes us see it in a way we would never have seen it under normal circumstances of living, as so many of us do, on sort of automatic pilot, going through the world without really seeing much of anything. . . .
So, to help us out of our blindness, part of what the painter is doing is saying, See what's there, not what you expect to see. See what is really present in your life. See yourself, see each other.
-Frederick Buechner, The Remarkable Ordinary: How to Stop, Look, And Listen To Life
"The only true voyage would be, not to visit strange lands, but to possess other eyes."
-Proust, The Captive. An epigraph used by Margaret Heffernan in the chapter Think Like An Artist from her book, Uncharted: How To Navigate The Future
Posts
All Comments
