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IC w10 What you see is what you get

  • HildeMaassen
  • Apr 4, 2020
  • 4 min read

Updated: Aug 15, 2020

In the week 8 forum, Cheung wrote about a number of reporting documents (in photos) that paid tribute to the African heritage. She experienced some sort of threat as a viewer She assumed that other Africans could interpret this differently.

I'm sure viewers of African descent would interpret differently, wondering what the purpose was and how it could be interpreted.


As a result, a memory and the chicken in the second photo were triggered.


What do we see and why do we see something and how do we interpret what we see is something that has been preoccupying scientists for a long time.


I can't imagine anyone not being interested in it if only it affects what people see in our photos.


Man with chicken


In the week 8 forum, Cheung wrote about an advertising campaign with photos that, she wrote, paid tribute to the African heritage. As a viewer, she experienced a kind of threat. She assumed that other Africans could interpret this differently. I am sure viewers of African descent would interpret differently, wondering what the purpose was and how it could be interpreted. The second photo, of a man with a chicken, brought back to me a memory of an investigation I had heard about a long time ago and which I sometimes tell about in my lessons. The investigation had shown people of a tribe in Papua New Guinea a film of New York and these knives turned out to have seen a man with a chicken. That while the researchers themselves did not remember that image at all and had to look back at the fragment a few times to find it at all.


The chicken was not all that people recognized and could refer to, it was also essential for survival; food.

The example above tells about the article that I was probably my source in time. I have it now from a book "Intercultural Competences" by Patrick T.H.M Janssen. He explains in the book that culture is always linked to a group. But that people can belong to several groups. I am Dutch, but also European. It is not transferred through the genes, DNA but has been learned. The position or culure is relative. We compare our habits with those of others.


It also gives meaning to the world around us. We need it as a reference point to (be able to) place what we see. To be able to provide it with a meaning. As I just wrote that a chicken for the people of Papua New Genuia "eat" is that while I rarely think "eat" when I see a chicken. In our Western world, the way meat is packaged and store-wrapped skin has moved us further from the source of that food, the chicken, cow, or pig. We find that more comfortable, "comfort zone" safer and that is also what culture does for the people who belong to it. It creates safety.


Through this MA I found out how many Dutch photographers I know and how little, relatively, from the outside. I think that pattern can be seen in the other students. I think it is the absolute added value of the program that there are people who live elsewhere and / or have the roots. This brought me into contact with other types of photographers and artists and I realize how isolated and limited our daily world is.


What we see and experience also depends on what we are asked or asked for as becomes clear in the video below.

In addition, looking is also something that can be practiced on the one hand, but that is genetically determined on the other. Watching is in the DNA, I was told by an ophthalmologist.


My son was asked to be a test subject when he was 2.5. The intention was that a group of people at a clinic had to learn to recognize eye problems in children at a young age. (My son had no eye problems but they were just looking for a group of children who spoke Dutch and were between about 3 and 4 years old


The ophthalmologist tested my son and turned around within a few minutes asking me what my husband was visually and / or doing. I replied quite surprised that we were both photographers but why he asked. Then he told me that my son was definitely a "viewer" and that it was genetic. He was still too young to have learned it.


How we can learn to see can be seen in a test that Canon did. Before that they asked 3 people to look at the same picture. Eye tracking software registered what they were looking at, and she was also asked to say what they saw. The video has unfortunately now been removed from the internet, but the results can still be read in various articles.

The test shows a big difference between the amateur, student photography and photographer. I also think that's right. I remember from my BA that I really looked better and different. Yet there was also a lot of criticism on this test because the photographer himself took the photo; Joel Grimes* and we are always reluctant to view our own work differently and this photographer is also color-blind.


* I once went to a lecture by Joel Grimes and what struck me was that he paid a lot of attention to every detail in the photo. He described that he made panoramas by stitching series of photos and then shot them in HDR which is natural madness; people shoot in HDR. In addition, each scene was illuminated with flash light, all to get the effect that was still there.





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