Unravelling Our Experience

“You bring to the act of photography all the pictures you have seen, the books you have read, the music you have heard, the people you have loved.” - Ansel Adams.

In my previous blog I argued that intuitions about whether an image is “fake” or not is, properly speaking, judged not against a world “out there” but against an inner reality – a reality that begins with our experience. For example, suppose that we photograph a scene – let’s say it is a picturesque island in a lake somewhere in Western Ireland and the resulting RAW file shows telephone lines cutting across the top of the image. We might not even have noticed them when we pressed the shutter, but there they are. If we were to clone out the telephone lines, would that make the image “fake” or “inauthentic”? We cannot answer this question simply by asking: “Are the telephone lines really there?”, for the reality we are making our judgment against is not the “out there” reality, but the “in here” reality.

It might be thought that this is a difference that makes little difference. After all, even though we are each judging what is real by reference to our own inner experience, if (pretty much) anyone else stood there at the same time in the same place they would experience the same things we experience. Or so we suppose.

This is based, I suspect, on a very simplistic – indeed erroneous – picture of visual experience as one in which our retinas and brains function much like organic camera sensors, merely encoding the intensity of various frequencies of light across our retinas and then presenting that to our consciousness much like a RAW file imported into Lightroom. But the fact is that our conscious visual experience is the result of many layers and many dimensions of processing that are profoundly influenced by both our current psychological state as well as longer term aspects of who we are. In a now famous experiment (search for “monkey business illusion”), psychologists showed people a video that included someone dressed in a gorilla suit plainly walking into the middle of the scene, beating their chest several times, and then calmly walking off. Yet, by asking the subjects to focus their attention on other aspects of the scene, around half failed to see (or notice) the gorilla. Yet it was right there in front of them. Any half-competent magician could have predicted this.

At a deeper level, how we perceive the world is profoundly influenced by such things as our individual values, feelings, past experiences, expectations, assumptions, and our entire conceptual scheme or worldview. For example, seeing telephone lines is only possible for someone who has at least a rudimentary conceptual grasp of telephones. The crow, one imagines, sees a perch, and the squirrel, an aerial highway. The philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein once wrote that if a lion could speak we would not understand it. His reasoning stems from the vastly different “forms of life” that we and lions inhabit. The lion and the human may both gaze out onto the Serengeti, but they experience profoundly different inner realities when they do. Humans, of course, do not differ as much from each other we do from lions, but this should not trap us into assuming that others must experience the world just as we do. There is no perceiver-neutral inner reality of experience.

The second thing underpinning my approach to such things as cloning and image manipulation more generally is that in art the distinctive dimension of our individual experience (or as the case may be, our imagination) that we are seeking to express is the aesthetic. For landscape photographers this typically begins when we attend to our experience of the world and discover within it arrangements of elements that appeal to us aesthetically. The process of composition is then essentially one of striving to bring those elements into relation with each other such that it maximises that overall aesthetic appeal. But with rare exceptions our composition, however skillfully crafted, will contain elements that fail to appeal to us – for example, telephone lines or a blade of grass that bends in different direction from the rest. And to be clear, I do not mean that such elements necessarily detract from the aesthetic appeal we find in a scene, though they might, but simply that they do not appeal to us aesthetically. They may be as aesthetically invisible to us as is infrared light to our retina. This, I suspect, is typically the case for those who prefer black and white photography to colour. In a literal sense Ansel Adams saw the world in colour just as almost all of the rest of us do, but at least judging by his output he responded aesthetically not to its colours but to its tones. Adams, of course, worked using black and white film, so colour would not have been captured, but that choice itself reflects the very point I am making. The colours that he saw in a scene had little or no aesthetic interest for him. Removing the colour from an image, as many of us do, is in essence, I would argue, akin to removing telephone lines, given that they similarly do not appeal to us aesthetically.

Now at this point a reader might be concerned that my approach to such things as cloning and image manipulation is dangerously or problematically laissez faire. It might seem as though all things are permissible, in my view, in the pursuit of our artistic goals. But I have not yet said anything directly of an ethical nature about cloning or what modifications to an image I believe might be ethically permissible. As I hope to make clear, I believe that we have obligations to our audience that typically constrain, sometimes severely, the changes that we may ethically make to an image. But exploring that will have to be the burden of a subsequent blog.