Image / Seeing Research Task: Mark Leahy

Looking and Seeing, Understanding a Photograph

Figure 1: Hilda Alexandra Asplin, Carol Ann Collins, Ithwen Iris Hughes and Maureen Moses 2020

‘To look at something means to gaze your eyes upon or acknowledge its presence. In order to see, not only does one look at the object but he/she also understands it and pays attention to it.’ (Differencebetween.info, 2020) This mean to see it and not only to acknowledge but to understand and pay attention. It also means to look past the obvious.

To understand a photograph, we must briefly understand the process of photography. ‘it is a popular belief that photography was invented by one man. When the process was made public in 1839 his name was attached to it but the “one man” Daguerre, did not actually take the first photograph.’ (Pollack, 1977.p11)

Before the invention of photography, the camera obscura was invented as a drawing tool for artist. The camera obscura observed that when light passed through a small aperture in a shutter covering the window to a dark room, a cast, inverted image of the external view appeared on the opposite wall’ (Edwards, 2006.p74). This device was the basic building blocks of the photographic camera.

The essential purpose of photography is documentation and communication. ‘Photography has profoundly disturbed the balance between verbally and visually transmitted information’ (Hiley, 1983, p.21) these forms of communication are for information, discovering, recording, entertainment and self-expression. ‘Pictures are a photographer's means of expression as a writer's means are words’ (Purbaya, 2019).

A photograph is a result of the photographer’s decision that is worth recording that significant event or object that has been seen. ‘A photograph celebrates neither the event itself nor the faculty of sight in itself. A photograph is already a message about the event that is recorded.’ (Berger and Dyer, 2013.p18). To put this in a simplest form the photograph is record to what the photographer is seeing and what they feel is worth recording. A photograph explains nothing, the events portrayed are in themselves. What gives a photograph its meaning? ‘The true content of a photograph is invisible, for it derives form a play, not with form, but with time.’ (Berger and Dyer, 2013.p19).

References:

Berger, J. and Dyer, G. (2013). Understanding a photograph. London: Penguin Books.

Differencebetween.info. (2020). Difference between Looking and Seeing | Looking vs Seeing. [online] Available at: http://www.differencebetween.info/difference-between-looking-and-seeing [Accessed 24 Feb. 2020].

Edwards, S. (2006). Photography. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Pollack, P. (1958). The picture history of photography, from the earliest beginnings to the present day. New York: H.N. Abrams.

List of Illustrations:

Figure 1: Heath,K. (2020) Family Archive.