Seeing and familiarity

Everything must be evaluated before we have expectations of it

A few months ago, I explained why I believe there is no such thing as an absolute decisive moment; and examined how my own point of reference has shifted over time – both of these posts lead to some discussions in the comments over the whole question of why we seem to shoot better when taken out of our usual environments. I think that answer is fairly simple, and has to do with the same underlying principles of subject isolation: if something looks different, it will stand out, and if we can observe/see it, we can notice, compose for and photograph it. But the first part of that flow – the ‘standing out’ – can only happen if we either train ourselves to continually and consciously evaluate every portion of a scene, or we are thrust into a place where there is no familiar frame of reference so our minds cannot subconsciously pattern recognise and dismiss. The real question for a photographer is: how can we control this to some extent?

What exists before pattern recognition? Conscious evaluation, of course.

Pattern recognition is something that operates at what I think of as a semi-subconscious level: we notice things, and can choose to pay more conscious attention or not. A good example of this is if we are interested in say, cars, then we start noticing what’s on the roads around us. (It is often said that once you buy something, you tend to see it everywhere around you.) But if we are taking the bus in a foreign country, then we probably are paying acute attention to the details in the buses to make sure we don’t get on the wrong one, rather than what kinds of cars are used as taxis. This is an evolved coping mechanism: if our conscious mind had to continually evaluate every single element in our immediate environments as though we were seeing it for the first time, we’d land up overwhelmed or incapable of doing anything else. It is for this reason that new environments seem to be more intense or actively different than the one we came from – our brains have to sample to see what can be boxed into the familiar category (along with its attendant properties; for instance, a lamp post is a lamp post functionally and mostly form-wise in every country) – and what has to be treated differently.

Flying in dreams

That which qualifies for ‘treated differently’ inevitably represents some of the local differences between places; it’s almost always these differences that are what gets picked up on by travel photographers and subsequently emphasised – and even stereotyped. Soon we land up with a cliche, and an images that reflect that, themselves becoming no different from the rest of the images from that place – for example, a camel in front of the Pyramids, or a baguette-carrying person in Paris. To me, this is a bit lazy: we have let somebody else do the observing and evaluating for us, and consequently, landed up making a boring image that’s no different to the expectations of everybody else. Point number one: take nothing for granted when you travel; evaluate everything as though you are seeing it for the first time in person, which is probably not far from the truth anyway. Practically, it means that for your preplanning, either you look at a lot of images from those locations – or none at all. The first is so that you have such a wide spread nothing sticks; the second is to make it easier for you to respond to and record your own impressions.

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Kindergarten murder scene

But few of us can travel all the time, and even if we can, your subconscious responds by insulating you one level higher up: you stop observing very much at all. If you ask a businessperson who regularly travels if they feel inspired or excited when they step off a plane, you’ll probably get a no. I personally find that the more I travel, the harder I have to try to see new things: especially if it’s a place where I’ve been before. Assuming you aren’t so familiar with the place you are jaded (difficult if you are not there all the time, because there are still environmental changes that can work in your favour to provoke differences) – a typical flow during a photographic trip is the first few days start off with intense visual overload; you shoot everything and anything that seems to be interesting or different, and then towards the end of the trip your frame of reference has adjusted enough that you’re no longer reacting on a hair trigger, but instead some conscious evaluation and pre-curation is taking place before you hit the shutter. Most of my best images from any trip are made on the last day – up to 50%. Not shooting for the first couple of days and just observing can help quite a bit – both in terms of semi-acclimatisation and curation later. I’d still carry a camera, though – it’s entirely possible you may come across one or two scenes that really are worth recording and subsequently unrepeatable.

Not different. Begone, temptation

Since becoming a parent, I’ve observed this behaviour on a longer scale in my own shooting habits: we have a subject we encounter daily, but is also changing and developing quickly – so the subject itself isn’t really the same. And the rate of change is fast enough that you’re consciously aware of it. A similar reason is probably at the core of both why we are fascinated by human documentary and photographing our own friends and families – without this, the rate of anything changing is too slow to be interesting. Yet my average number of images has decreased from 100 a month in the first few months to perhaps 10-20 now – does that mean the subject is less interesting, or that I’ve become overly used to it? Yes and no, I think; to some degree the rate of change has slowed down somewhat, so there isn’t so much to document or new environments to put my daughter into.

THE conversation

The challenge then becomes noticing when something changes: in this case, in Sophie’s behaviour. To make sense later, and to adequately serve their purpose as mnemonics, we need to have sufficient context (i.e. storytelling) that our memories can reconstruct the rest of the situation at a later date. This is an important point to staying continually inspired when photographing in your own hometown or familiar environment: observe the changes. This way, we’re firstly not trying to fight human nature by forcing ourselves to waste time and brain power on something that might genuinely not be interesting to anybody (for whatever reason) – but since we will notice changes anyway, stop and take a moment to evaluate whether they might be photographically interesting, and if so, you might as well make an image. I for one would have never thought the change of parenting would result in a change in the way I observe the world – both because you can see how the human mind develops, and because it forces you to consider your own habits? MT

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