seeing with camera eyes

'To collect photography is to collect the world', Susan Sontag writes in On Photography. With a beautiful resonance, this initially rings rightly true. With the camera, I can capture and materialise what my eyes see. I can turn an intangible construct on my retina into an object. To store it and revisit it whenever it pleases me. I can hold the world close.

Of course we have to ask, which world?, as Judith Butler so often does. And also, which eyes?

The camera is often likened to the eye. Of all art forms, it 'sees' and represents reality most closely to the human eye. We can focus on the foreground or the background, the colours, textures and resolution appear to be similar to how humans perceive reality.

There is so much to see in the world, and when I take myself and my camera out, I often find myself within a tension: what do I want to 'capture', and what do I want to simply look at?

For, taking photographs of the world, for me, is integral to my being-in-in-the-world. Of perceiving and understanding the world in a particular way. And what I realised is, I actually 'see' very differently when I look through the camera compared to when I just look at the world through my eyes.

Susan Sontag also writes that 'photographs are perhaps the most mysterious of all the objects that make up, and thicken, the environment we recognize as modern.'

Of course, the modern world is fundamentally a world we no longer know in the way we thought we did. Things aren't what they seem(ed). And like the early modernist artists, I can indulge in this practice of using artistic practice to accentuate those deviations from the known.

The other thing that intrigues me about Sontag's sentiment is that photographs can 'thicken' the environment. What does she mean by that?

If I look through my camera lens, really look, I encounter the world through the unique mechanical and digital workings of my camera. Pointing the camera at the world doesn't just produce one singular representation. Adjusting the focus changes the shapes and contours of objects in the world. With a low f-stop, clear-cut outlines become blurry gestalten. Objects blur together, make up new ones all together. Depending on the reach of my focal length, I can foreground texture, transitions and miniscule details.

Standing still and experiencing what the camera can do, what it can make from the world, is an almost meditative experience for me. It's no longer the essentialist idea of photography that makes reality, and the world, easily graspable. By looking, and looking again, the camera can challenge our habitual perception of the world. It can unearth layers of visuality that are hidden from my eye alone. It can thicken reality. So that the viewer of my photographs is encouraged to not only look, or to know, but think about and unknow what they see.

So, what world is this then that I'm photographing? Using the camera in the world is a way to experience how entangled we are with our surroundings. I'm in a world that is also inside my camera. By using my camera, I can make those entanglements visible and graspable. I can materialise not only an object of the world, but all the different layers of seeing and knowing that which make up the world.

That leaves me with an excitement to go out again, look, let the camera see, look again, to find something I'm still not seeing.

Susan Sontag (1977). On Photography. Penguin.