Learning To See: What Makes a Photograph More Than a Picture
One of my favorite quotes is “The goal of any artist is to show you something you might otherwise not have seen…”
While I don’t know who originally uttered those lines, they resonate with me.
My personal work is rooted in observation of the world around me—what I encounter in my travels and wanderings, and what I see in the interplay of light, form, pattern and texture.
There are old jokes about the cobbler whose own children lack shoes, or the accountant who doesn’t balance his own checkbook.
In my case, I have a bit of the ‘familiarity breeds contempt’ syndrome.
The day-to-day living in one’s hometown can turn to complacency. And I have found that true. Because when I go someplace new I see it with fresh eyes. It’s a process of discovery. It’s an “Oh, look at that!” moment.
Seeing What Others Might Miss
You are probably familiar with the story of Ansel Adams’ most iconic image, “Moonrise, Hernandez, New Mexico.” He was driving down the highway when he saw the spectacular image unfolding before him.
Undoubtedly there were other cars on that same road, but how many do we think even saw the interplay of light and form unfolding, let alone stopped to look at it?
And in the fleeting moments he had to assemble his 8×10 view camera, frame the image, and mentally calculate the exposure for the photograph he had previsualized, he was able to make just one exposure before the sun disappeared and the magical light evaporated.
In John Szarkowski’s seminal book The Photographer’s Eye, he devotes a chapter to “The Frame”—the square or rectangle available in the camera viewfinder that determines what the photographer will allow into the image from all the visual information available in front of them.
As my good friend, well-known photographer Joe Baraban states, “The goal is to present your photography in such a way as to take control of how the viewer perceives and processes the information we lay out to him in the form of a photograph.”
You include, or exclude, what you want the viewer to see or not see.
You are in control of directing their eye to what you found important.
Learning To See in Black and White
Traditionally, photographers tended to work primarily in either black and white (where so many, like me, started out) or in color.
As I recount in the story of my Zurich image gallery, done in the days of film, I started my exploration of Zurich on a cold, overcast winter’s day, and started to think I would not expose a single frame. It wasn’t until I started “seeing” in black and white that the whole day of shooting unfolded.
These days, with the ability to capture things digitally, sometimes the decision in how to render the final image is done in the digital darkroom. While there was something special in the scene to cause it to be recorded in the first place, sometimes the file reveals itself slyly, and guides me to the correct final rendering.
I have found myself more and more returning to my B&W roots, and “seeing” in black and white.
A case in point is “Corporate Gothic,” an image from a day wandering the downtown streets of Chicago simply soaking in the visual treats I encountered.
And while there is a gallery of color images from that day, it was only when I revisited some previously overlooked frames that I realized the dynamic graphics of the buildings, side-lit in the late afternoon sun, created such a strong geometry of form and texture that I felt it was best expressed in monochrome.
Especially with the ability to use the equivalent of the Wratten #25 red filter that Ansel used to darken the blue sky in “Moonrise,” with digital, we can effectively use multiple filters at one time and affect the tonality in the image in ways not formerly possible in the days of film.
“Sometimes the photograph waits patiently until we are ready to see it…” —Michael Hart
Color Has Its Own Voice
Conversely, there are times when color is what is dictated by the scene.
While “Cathedral Porsche” has all the texture and detail one would expect from an Edinburgh street scene, it’s the splash of red against the stone grey of the church that draws the eye.
It would not be nearly as dramatic or exciting rendered in black and white.
“Art is not what you see, but what you make others see.” – Edgar Degas
What Commercial Photography Taught Me About Seeing
My lifetime of commercial work has absolutely informed my personal work.
When you are creating images for commerce, whether advertising or corporate work, you are trying to grab the viewer's attention and get them involved in your visual.
Especially in the industrial arena, which, let’s be honest, can be kind of ugly at any given moment.
So I learned to look for what was visually striking, whether through patterns, lines and shapes, or through the way light falls across them.
As in this image from a drill site in Saudi Arabia.
That discipline carries over into how I see the world—and ultimately into how I make my personal photographs.
And in this digital age, when everyone is looking at a screen on their phone or, at best, on a desktop computer, it’s thrilling to see your work printed and on a wall. A visual testament to having been there, having seen that, and keeping the memory alive in tactile form.
Looking Versus Seeing
A photograph begins with looking. But looking is not the same thing as seeing.
Seeing means recognizing the relationship between the elements in front of you—and deciding what matters. It means knowing what to leave in the frame, what to leave out, when the light has changed everything, and sometimes whether the photograph wants to be black and white or color.
And ultimately, it means hoping that someone standing in front of the finished print sees something they might otherwise have missed.
After more than five decades of making photographs, I’ve come to believe that photography is less about finding subjects than learning to see relationships.
Perhaps that is what I have been trying to do all along: to see something in the world that might otherwise go unnoticed, and then make a photograph that allows someone else to see it, too.