Cambrian Specs

If you're a regular reader of Mike Johnston's TOP blog you've probably noticed how, over the years, his posts have alternated unevenly between obsessive examinations of photographic gear and jeremiads about not obsessing about photographic gear. It's all about the pictures, you gearheads! No, wait, it's all about the best standard prime lens money can buy! At the moment, Gear Mike seems to have the upper hand over Picture Mike (a cynic might say that this, realistically, probably does return better reader figures) so a recent post about how the pleasure of seeing precedes photography stood out all the more. He concluded that "these things remind me that before photography comes the joy and the wonder of simply seeing. It's one of the reasons for photography in the first place." Well, yep and amen.

I was going to make some idiotic comment there* about the superiority of "Eyes 1.0", but realised that would make me sound like a creationist. In evolutionary release-number terms, we must really be on Eyes version X.Y, where "X" is a very large number, and "Y" is an even larger number. Technically, we may even still be in the beta phase. Eyes have come a long way since the Cambrian, 500 million years ago, but are still far from perfect. I have recently come to realise that my phone screen is not blurry, and I may have to start using reading-glasses soon. Like Apple devices, eyes look great, but lack the necessary ports for essential peripherals. What was that about a blind watchmaker?

Of course, seeing may primarily involve Eyes X.Y, but it also requires Nervous System X.Y, Vascular System X.Y, and so on. The joy of seeing is a whole body experience that situates us convincingly and quite often ecstatically in the world. It also makes extensive use of whatever the latest release of one's own emotional and aesthetic firmware might be. Which is problematic; a lot of us, it seems, fail to regularly update that firmware, and may even still be using a very early version indeed. What else can explain the popularity of videos of cats on social media?

I suppose the point is not just that eyes make cameras look a little simple, but that "photography" is not so much a way of seeing as a way of making things to look at. Although I have a long-standing sympathy for those who argue that using a camera to make pictures is more than a mechanical process – well, of course it is – it isn't much more than that, when compared to whole-body input-and-output experiences like painting or drawing. If you have ever tried to draw a convincing likeness of a person (never mind one that seems to offers insight into the personality of both the sitter and the drawer) you will know how mechanical and – crucially – external to your "whole self" the skill-set of photography really is. Although it is equally true that, if you have ever despaired of the ability of your eyes, brain, nerves, muscles and tendons to make sufficiently satisfying marks on paper to create such a likeness, you may well have fallen back on the mechanical almost-perfection of a photograph; not as an end, but as an aid.

Which, I suppose, is why I'm increasingly interested in picture-making from photographic elements, rather than in photographs as an end in themselves. Whatever anyone else makes of the resulting images, it's just so much more satisfying to do, and consistently and reliably takes me into a similar place to Mike Johnston's "joy and the wonder of simply seeing".

* A number of my comments on TOP have ended up as a "Featured Comment", which would be gratifying, except that it has the annoying side-effect of removing any link back to this blog! I mean, why else would I be making a comment, other than a transparent attempt to attract new readers?