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Under the darkness of a rather cold night, I wonder just how much of the world I see when my eyes are open, and what are the things that I usually focus on? Do I have a natural proclivity to just look at the same objects and sites that come into my awareness, do I follow conditioned patterns, do my eyes have visual rail tracks that it normally runs on, or blinders to things on the periphery? It’s impossible to observe everything with two eyes, or perhaps that just happens when the eyes are closed? How blind am I really, and is that the reason I like to walk around with a camera, challenging myself to see things differently, framing the world to the size of a viewfinder, allowing myself to look in new directions, searching for the visual that usually gets passed by. Perhaps that’s why I keep shooting images, obsessively observing, letting attention flow free, allowing light into the unconsciousness blindness that often inhabits my sight. In many ways, the camera has become my guide dog to the everyday visual world I inhabit, leading me down roads that I would naturally not take, like water cascading down a hilly incline, always taking the path of least resistance.
When I see the blind, I wonder just how much of the world they are missing, yet perhaps the other senses compensate and allow sounds, smells and temperatures to form internal visuals that no camera will ever be able to capture. We need camera’s of the mind, image processors for the brain, ways of seeing the unseen … or is that simply what we call art?
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