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The art of observation

e live in an age of point-and-shoot immediacy. But pointing and shooting is not seeing not understanding. New technologies, such as computational photography and digital cameras, make it easier for people to think they are seeing when all they are really doing is looking with a camera. When we look at something, although our mind may be active, we are not fully engaged in creating through seeing and understanding. The point and shoot mentality is all about output with little understanding of input. In the past, what distinguished the professional from the amateur was not only skill with the camera, but also a financial and personal investment in the technology.

Our parents generation armed with Kodak Instamatics and Polaroid Land cameras were sold on the idea that photography was as easy as pushing a button. Marketers pitched products that made photography cheaper and easier, but not necessarily better.For generations, the camera industry has promoted the looking, pointing and shooting for the masses approach to photography because people werent willing to mortgage their homes for a camera and a darkroom. Nor were people willing to take the time to develop the skills needed. In this digital age, camera manufacturers are still peddling the faster, cheaper, easier point-and-shoot way of thinking, from camera phones to pro-sumer digital single lens reflex cameras. This approach, however, subordinates seeing and observing to an act of merely looking and possessing what we see. Before we learn to write, we read. Before we learn to see, we look. This modest supposition assumes what it means to be a visual communicator today. Writing and seeing are on the flip side of the reading/looking dichotomy. When we write, we occupy our senses through sight and touch. When we learn to see, our perceptual experiences are activated through the senses. Training Ourselves to See Frederick Franck suggests that meaning is lost when all we do is look at something. To see something means to understand it in a deeper way. Seeing is a transformative experience it suggests action in that it promotes feeling, thinking and responding toward something. Passively look-

ing at something, however, means noticing without acting. When we open our eyes, mind and heart to the world around us, we become alive in it. In a culture saturated with visual messages, our eyes, and by extension our minds and hearts, have become numb and anesthetized to the desire to seek out the deeper meanings of the things we are exposed to. By default, we have allowed ourselves to fall victim to the estrangement and immunization of truly seeing things as they are. With so much for us to look at, we have become estranged from the intuitive act of seeing. As Franck contends, Everything in our society seems to conspire against our inborn human gift of seeing. In an age of instant gratification, we must be trained to see in order to encounter the deeper meaning of things in the world. In his book, The Photographic Experience, Jeff Berner notes, When mere looking evolves into the art of seeing, we experience deeper revelation and perhaps even understanding. Seeing vs. Looking At The art of observation begins with immersing ourselves in the textures and tones of life. Observation requires us to immerse ourselves in looking and listening without passing judgment on the impressions we collect. We must free ourselves from the biases, preferences and prejudices we hold toward our subjects.Learning to observe people, places, and activities in the world can make us better storytellers, communicators, writers and photographers. For Robert Wolf, observation is a process of immersing ourselves in listening and looking more carefully. Learn to observe without judging, without letting thought intrude between you and the object. When you see a sunset or a landscape and say, How beautiful, you are not immersed in it, and will notice only part of what you might otherwise have seen. Ultimately, photography, as a form of communication, is about acknowledging the value of relationships between things that will provide a context for the experiences we have. Sense of place means making connections to the impressions we collect.