S H Bean ~ Photographer

What do things look like when we do not look at them part 2

By S H Bean on August 11, 2014

We must ask ourselves what is meant by this statement? As I read it the word “look” seems to be the most critical, and if we revisit the difference between seeing and perceiving perhaps it is possible to find some understanding.

Of course I am only able to discuss this from the point of view of my own history as an Artist and Photographer.

Seeing is the act of profane vision: that of common sight, the kind we use when we for instance when we go for a walk in a seemingly visually stable Landscape. Seeing is the biological role of our vision. The act of perceiving is one based on prior knowledge and of experience and the level of knowledge can of course vary, and we use it to assert the colour of daylight and of course the color of shadows.

The Early Light Project explores a perceptual approach to reading the landscape and is a process, like acquiring knowledge, of searching for appearances and their imminent visibility.

“…a blissful sense of liberating non-objectivity drew me forth into a “desert”, where nothing is real except feeling..”.

Kazimir Malevich. Part II of The Non-Objective World (part of BAUHAUS book No 11. 1927)