This series, the Biology of Vision, is an ongoing photographic project that began during 2009.
Since childhood I have been intrigued by the perplexing nature of human sight: why did a view, glanced out of the corner of my eye, be more demanding of my attention than when looked at directly? And why did squinting, although rendering an image more blurry, sometimes bring greater definition to the bigger picture?
During my teenage years when I began looking at photographs, it became obvious that not all the most famous, the most moving or the most cerebral images required prodigious sharpness and clarity as key components for their success. In comparison with today's stellar image quality, many of the very best photographs from the past are overly grainy, suffer from excessive contrast and exhibit limited depth of field. And yet these "failings" are utterly inconsequential. In some examples, these technical limitations contribute in many ways to the essence of these extraordinary photographs.
More recently, with the increasing technical sophistication of the camera, the lens, the quality of screens where much of today's photography is displayed and the "wow" factor that these technologies deliver, it is ideas and content that seem to reside at the bottom of the list of relevant discussion points.
Of course, there are many, many wonderful examples to disprove that previous statement but as a sweeping generalisation I think it holds true. Discussions about lens resolution, sensor size and dynamic range etc., continue to be important because they help us refine our photographic skills, knowledge and critical awareness but surely there also needs to be a space to discuss more broader issues and perhaps none more crucial than:
how do we see and how do we make sense of what we see.
This seems especially true for photographers whose chosen equipment for illustrating their imagination includes, in most cases the camera, a device that has such a close resemblance to the functionality of the human eye.
James Elkins in his book, 'The Object Stares Back' says,
"At first, it appears that nothing could be easier than seeing. We just point our eyes where we want them to go, and gather in whatever there is to see. Nothing could be less in need of explanation. The world is flooded with light, and everything is available to be seen. Seeing does not interfere with the world or take anything from it, and it does not hurt or damage anything. Seeing is detached and efficient and rational. Unlike the stomach or the heart, our eyes are our own to command: they obey every desire and thought."
However, James Elkins goes on to explain, "Each of these ideas is completely wrong. The truth is more difficult: seeing is irrational, inconsistent and undependable. Our eyes are not ours to command: they roam where they will and then tell us they have only been where we have sent them.
No matter how hard we look, we see very little of what we look at.
We are blind to certain things and blind to blindness."
Many optical illusions, including this cognitive illusion shown here, provide a powerful appreciation of the interplay between our eyes and brain. They help us disentangle the assumed link between perception and factual knowledge.
Photography
I have spent much of the past decade and a half photographing what I imagine it would be like to record that moment before our eyes miraculously snap an object into focus - that other ‘decisive moment’ before all the obscure possibilities are sadly and regrettably excluded and we see only what we have learnt to see. At the most fundamental level, this ability to focus so quickly and precisely and then to process that information so rapidly has played a pivotal role in our species success, but I would like to think that perhaps today, when the threat of imminent attack by a predator is not quite so likely, that a more thoughtful, considered approach to responding to our surroundings would impart fresh insights into our current circumstances.
The de-focused photograph
All the images in this series, The Biology of Vision, have been photographed with the camera lens de-focused and with the aperture stopped down only 1 to 2 stops. If you take any of these lens settings to the extremes, nothing of the subject matter is discernible.
In the examples above, there is a clear distinction between a blurred image created by de-focussing the lens (2nd image) and a blur filter applied to the image after capture (3rd image). The de-focused image illustrates the way our idea of reality is betrayed when the various wavelengths of light are not brought to their point of convergence as we expect they should (as seen in the first image). This is most likely the way our eyes would "see" if we had a greater ability to control focus long enough to "capture" an unfocused image. But our eyes, being more like a movie camera than a still camera, can't hold the image long enough to "burn" that vision to our memory. It's literally gone in the blink of an eye.
In the first, focused image, the dull familiarity of a mundane concrete column in a grey carpark allows us to rapidly assign a description and a value judgement before we quickly move on. "Nothing to see here", we might say.
However, once the obvious descriptive cues are reduced all sorts of possibilities are revealed. Whilst it might be true that seeing is believing it is also demonstrably true that believing affects our understanding of what we see.
Colour
A de-focused image also tends to be softer in contrast and therefore colour intensity seems more suppressed (see the 1st and 3rd images below). However, attempting to overcome this apparent disadvantage proved to be a revelation. I found that applying what I would normally consider ridiculously excessive colour saturation to an image where the descriptive cues had been reduced, now appeared creatively feasible (2nd and 4th images). Even the photographs that initially appear almost devoid of colour seem to have within their limited palette, surprising colour variations that become more beguiling the longer they are studied.
Many of these colour possibilities would not have been achievable without the advent of digital photo processing software. It could be argued that for Black and White photography, the digital revolution has had limited impact but for colour work, the resultant outcomes have been extraordinary.
Ideas
Like many innovations though, there is always push-back against less "intrinsic" and "fundamental" techniques and ideas. This un-thinking reluctance to contemplate the possibilities of alternative perspectives is disappointing but as a society we have been here many times before.
For example, the Romantic poet John Keats complained that Isaac Newton, who famously discovered in 1666 that light could be refracted into separate wavelengths, "had destroyed all the poetry of the rainbow by reducing it to its prismatic colours".
This common reaction of conflating long-held and rigid belief systems with the process of objectively establishing facts through testing and experimentation is nicely pierced in Victoria Finlay’s book, 'Colour'
She states, "Colour – like sound and scent – is just an invention of the human mind responding to waves and particles that are moving in particular patterns through the universe. Poets should not thank nature but themselves for the beauty and the rainbows they see around them".
So it’s not magic and arbitrary miracles that determine the poetry of the rainbow. It is our accumulated wisdom that illustrates how extraordinarily fortunate we are to be so proficient at exploring our own existence.
As Richard Dawkins says, “In the face of … stupefying odds it is you and I that are privileged to be here, privileged with eyes to see where we are and brains to wonder why.”
The de-focused image, as presented on the gallery pages of this website, has helped me understand how the constraints of convention can limit our visual language. It has also helped me understand and cherish the wonders of my privileged circumstance.
The images in this series were mostly photographed in central Melbourne, the surrounding suburbs and in regional Victoria where I also live. They were photographed with Nikon and Sony cameras and various lenses predominately of a standard focal length. Post production was accomplished with Aperture, Capture One and Affinity Photo software. All large format printing is performed by Image Science and framing by Fitzroy Stretchers.