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IC w4 What is to see

  • HildeMaassen
  • Feb 15, 2020
  • 5 min read

Updated: Aug 16, 2020

I read that much and not in the normal page “one to the end” order that I am lost in how to connect the dots and where I read what especially since al the writings quote other writers.


Joel Snyder and Neil Walsh Allen in Photography, vision and representation p.145 write about objectivity and subjectivity and the question if photography is a representation of nature.

I don’t think that it a photo is a representation of nature but we learned how to see and translate it to see it as if it is reality and it is represented better by time and the increased technical possibilities.


I remember having my first dog; he didn’t recognize dogs on the flat screen of the television or on paper but reacted to the sound of animals on screen. The dog that I have now is able to see the 2d images and reacts to them to the point that he didn’t want to pass a car with a photographic advertisement printed on it with a bigger than live person on it. I had to turn around and take another route. (The dog is 60 kilos and it is not that I can pick him up and go around a car).


I talked with other dog owners and they confirmed that their dogs are also able to recognize see two dimensional images and thinking of it, that was not that way 20 years ago. I did some research on the internet on this topic and several sites tell me that this is because of digital televisions that don’t flicker as much as the formal televisions did; that explanation sounds logic.


We have learned to look at photographes and interpreted them. But we have done so long before the moment photography was invented or introduced.


David Hockney started to look at drawn and painted images after he saw drawings of Ingres form around 1812 that were strangely small and detailed and had a kind of traced look. He is curious if the camera lucida was used. He tells about it in the documentary “secret knowledge”. He sees a big different in the painting from before and after approximately 1420 looking for “real, photographic, natural and truth to live” painting.

What amazes me is that he tells that the paintings of Vermeer looked strange to people in the time that they were made because things in the foreground looked bigger and he also uses a depth of field effect. So in that time people were not used to interpret a photo. I saw the paintings of Vermeer several times and I never even realized that it might have been strange.


Hockney starts to see that the early painters used mirrors to make the paintings and I have to think of the analogue Hasselblad that projects everything mirrored. I taught analogue photography using plate cameras and the Hasselblad 22 years. What I saw the last couple of years was that it was harder for my students to interpreted, see, the images. They have more problems with focusing and framing because the images are mirrored, and with the plate camera also upside-down. Is it that because of the in quality increased images we have at present that it is harder for them to use a bit of imagination to complete the images using our brain? But we all see ourselves in a mirror without having problems to put on make-up.


Two years ago I read an article that told about recent research that for the first time children are less intelligent as their parents. IQ tests test abstract thinking and this generation is very visually orientated but how is their power to abstract thinking? Is this what I noticed teaching students to see what is on the frosted glass of the camera? Because seeing the image that way asks for an abstract way of looking at the image.

I will never forget that my sons eyes were tested on the age of 2,5 by a professor who turned around within 5 minutes to ask me what kind of visual profession either I or my husband did since this boy was a “visual oriented, a looker”. (We both are photographers). He told me that is in the DNA and thus inherited and that he recognized it almost immediately. No surprise here that our son studies 3d art at the University and our daughter studies fine arts.


How does seeing the world through images influence us? Is it our new reality? The technology makes it possible to see more than our eyes can. That is the problem with the article of Snyder and Allen and a lot of the other readings I did. They are based on the analogue photography. For me there is a big difference with the digital images.

The increased lenses and bigger sensors based on an unnatural grid layout make the images different. In Analogue times I didn’t have a color cast on an image I a space with several light sources with different color temperatures when using flash and a shutter speed of 1/60sec. Whit the newest generations of digital cameras I get colorcasts. Another problem that occurs the last 5 years is that in portraits the hue of the skin, the underlying hue is visual in the image. When making a series of photographs and getting them the same color using a consistent color management system does not finish you. You have to work with color grading on selected skin tones. The photo gets in a way less realistic because things are seen that our eye can’t. The photo’s can be hyper realistic and I am not sure how this will develop in the future.


I have met with Neil Harbisson who calls himself a cyborg. He can “see” (hear) infrared and ultraviolet tones that normal people can’t. This is off course one person.


What is also very interesting is that the digital images often stay digital. And represented by code or pixels they need a medium, machine, and infrastructure to materialized in order to be seen. We see images on a screen and therefor they, in my opinion, are less realistic. We see the world on a screen more often.


Joanna Zylinska, professor who researches the new media, is trying to look at the present world from the future where our media became fossils. She writes about it in her book non-human photography. Very important is how photography records, remembers and creates live, a vision of itself.


She mentions that “after human” is becoming more important in art. She shows the work of Andreas Gursky and Edward Burtynsky who try to show what it will look like after the time that humans are gone.


“[we] come from nature.…There is an importance to [having] a certain reverence for what nature is because we are connected to it... If we destroy nature, we destroy ourselves.” – Edward Burtynsky


Imagine what it would look like, show what can be; that is what I recognise in my own images that I hadn’t thought of before and for sure something to research in more depth in the coming weeks.



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© 2019 by Hilde Maassen 

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