This could be a skirt. This could be a pony tail. In fact it’s a massive sheet of plastic pulled together and knotted around two stakes in the ground. To my way of seeing, this is a meta-photograph. We tend to think of meta-photography as photographs of people making photographs. But in this instance I’ve made a photograph of something doing what photographs do (metaphorically speaking).
This is a photograph of something drawing our attention to a focal point. The lines of the plastic remind us of the way light functions when it passes through a lens. All the lines settle on the stake in the same way that light passes through a camera lens and settles on the image sensor, or through the lens of an eye and settles on the retina.
When I was a kid, I was severely near-sighted. Apparently I have long eyeballs which means that light focuses in front of my retina and makes distant objects appear blurry. When I was in my early thirties, I had laser eye surgery to reshape my lenses. The result was stunning. However, the ophthalmologist cautioned that in time I would become far-sighted as part of the natural aging process. True enough, whenever I use an LCD screen to frame a photograph now, I have to stop everything and fish around in my pockets for my reading glasses.
Despite the analogy to eyesight, photography is nothing like natural eyesight. The focal point of a photograph is positioned front to back and the distance in front of and behind that point which remains in focus is called depth of field. But from side to side, and up and down, everything on the same plane as the focal point remains pretty much in focus.
Eyes don’t work that way. Our eyes focus light in a narrow range. The rest of our visual field, from side to side, and up and down (our peripheral vision), blurs and becomes increasingly blurred to the edges. Each eye also has a blind spot. But our brain compensates for this so that we are rarely aware either of the blind spot or of the fact that most of our visual field is blurred. Most of the time, we have no way to tell how much of our visual perception is presented to us courtesy of our eyes and how much courtesy of our brains. However, it’s fair to say that without brains to compensate for the limitations of our eyes, we would see far less than we do.
Because contemporary photographic technologies remove many of the limitations of seeing, it’s tempting to let our cameras do all the work. But when we do this, we forget that the real work of photography isn’t seeing, but looking. And the camera that can do our looking for us hasn’t been invented yet.
