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The Sasse: Where love stories develop between art and viewer | ||||
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Going Looking |
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"The question is not what you look at, but what you see." — Henry David Thoreau There is a word for seeing one thing inside another. Pareidolia. A face in a wall socket. A man in the moon. A landscape in a water stain on the ceiling. Scientists call it a glitch. The brain is a pattern machine, and it would rather find a face that isn't there than miss one that is. So it errs on the side of seeing. Every cloud animal, every ghost in a curtain, is the machine doing its job too well. Leonardo thought the glitch was a tool. He told painters to stare at old walls, at stains and broken stones, until battles and figures and whole countries rose out of them. Not to copy the wall. To wake up the eye. Five hundred years later, nothing has changed. One Sunday morning I was exploring the area around my studio with my camera, looking for whatever would catch my eye. A torn plastic bag in a dumpster did. Only later, processing the image, did I see the face. Nobody made it. Nobody meant it. It is only trash, and then it is looking back. The difference between the glitch and the tool is intention. Pareidolia happens to us. We are walking past and the face appears, unasked. The photographer goes looking for it. And the looking isn't finished until the image is processed. Found Object | 2022 - From Beyond the Studio Door |
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| by: Gene Sasse | |||||
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