A Playground for the Eye

“The eye accomplishes the prodigious work of opening the soul to what is not soul — the joyous realm of things and their god, the sun.”

Maurice Merleau-Ponty, The Primacy of Perception

With Iggy on the water en route to London, the past week or two has been an opportunity to curate the website and reflect on our Pan-American journey. It’s had me thinking about what makes a good photograph for me — what an image can do, and how it derives its power to connect and communicate experience.

Merleau-Ponty quoted just now posits the eye as an agent, reaching outward, bringing the world into being through the act of attending to it. Seeing is an ordering act. The eye selects, groups, resolves, and along with the imagination composes to make a world. I wonder if that is where one’s thinking about photos begins: the viewfinder as a limit within which the seen can be ordered into something shareable, entered by another world-maker, traversed with a quality of attention analogous to when the shutter was activated.

None of what follows comes from any study of photography as such. The curation exercise has been causing me to reflect on the cascading melange of ideas one has encountered across disciplines — all of these in turn echoes of different times of life, different cities, different lines of enquiry that turned out to connect in ways that weren’t obvious at the time. All while this time, our two years on the Carretera, comes to a close, and I find myself with so many new connections crowding my mind.

Before I ever went anywhere I studied Psychology — this was in Perth in the early nineties — and I remember being intrigued with Gestalt psychology. Gestalt, from the German for form or shape, is the insight that the visual system perceives organised wholes before individual parts, and that the whole carries meaning the parts alone don’t. Proximity, similarity, continuity, closure, figure and ground: not rules for making images but descriptions of how the eye processes the visual field. The governing principle, Prägnanz, is simply that the eye resolves complexity into the simplest available interpretation.

Thinking about it now, gestalt is perhaps where the root of the idea of composition as a journey rather than an arrangement. The eye enters, is captured, directed, brought to rest, redirected, and either escapes the frame or is returned to the interior. The visual field is a bounded world within which attention moves and discovers.

Fast forward five years and I found myself studying the History of Design via Architecture, having escaped Perth to Tasmania and then Melbourne. Somewhere in there was an assignment on the Bauhaus School — and a crucial connection was made. Walter Gropius, Josef Albers, Paul Klee: it turned out that the school’s search for a scientific foundation for good design had led it directly to gestalt psychology. Finding that connection was its own kind of shock. The Bauhaus represented a (distinctively German) fluency across science, industry, craft and theory.

Architecture also introduced Le Corbusier’s promenade architecturale — the designed journey through a building as a sequence of choreographed encounters. The journey that takes minutes in a building takes seconds in an image, but the structure turns out to be the same. An image, like a building, or a meeting, is a sequence of perceptual events. I found myself seeing equivalent experiential concepts (Otto Scharmer’s Theory U, for instance) in organisational psychology that could be explored in a professional setting in a synthesis not unlike Bauhaus.

The Bauhaus geometric schemata for instance are super interesting. Each schema triggers a specific cognitive and embodied response. The geometry is a key that opens a different perceptual register. The rule of thirds is maybe the most familiar: the frame divided into nine equal parts creates four intersection points where the eye first attempts to anchor meaning. The choice of which to activate is a choice of portal into the four-dimensional world contained within the frame. Less a prescription, it turns out, than a description of how the eye enters an unfamiliar space, and thereby a mechanism for establishing an empathic relationship between the photographer and the future viewer of the photograph.

As we wander around the art museums of Buenos Aires this week, I’m reminded of De Stijl (‘The Style’) the Dutch movement founded in 1917 by Theo van Doesburg and Piet Mondrian, another element in that formative History of Design period. De Stijl images are fundamentally impressionistic — how the world might appear to a visual system without sufficient resolution to resolve detail, distilled to blocks of primary colour. All lines/edges are expressed as either north-south or east-west. The proposition is that a colour/line reality underlies the high-resolution world in which we see and act.

To take the concept further… that a basic set of archetypes underlies experience, even at a perceptual level, that can be detected and referenced. In the diverse cultures, histories, cosmologies, and environments along the Panamerican, what was I learning about these archetypes? How was it finding it’s way into these images?

Back in the Architecture days I started to appreciate there was a kind of cross-disciplinary synthesis available to me that defied ‘fields of study’ as I’d previously understood. That realisation changed the trajectory of my life, unleashing intellectual enquiry long before travel, language and photography emerged as various means of its expression. The move to philosophy came later, through studies in Sydney and then with a move to Germany in the mid to late 2000s.

Psychology felt limited by being fundamentally descriptive — it could map pathology but the tools for changing it seemed to require working from perception and world view rather than the contents of experience. Architecture and Design had pointed toward this without resolving it, but it had made me realise that European thinkers across varying domains had been pulling this thread throughout the 19th and 20th century. Aesthetic theory sharpened a central question of continental philosophy: if perception is the ground of experience, what changes perception? The question carried me to German philosophy and then to Germany itself.

Seismic ideas followed, nothing short of searching for a different way to lead ones life… and I wonder whether photographs are one of the best ways to share that story with some humility. Making one’s experience available to others so that they may make of it as they will.

An early philosophic topic was Edmund Husserl, the founder of phenomenology. Husserl described the epoché as a bracketing of the natural attitude — the suspension of our taken-for-granted engagement with the world in order to attend to experience itself. In the natural attitude we move through the world purposively, consuming rather than attending. The epoché interrupts that. It holds experience up for inspection on its own terms. With this in mind, the photograph, is a Husserlian bracket: a moment of the world suspended, removed from the flow of before and after, offered for pure attention.

Kierkegaard, in the Philosophical Fragments and the Concluding Unscientific Postscript, wrote of eternities in time: the possibility that the eternal could irrupt into a single moment and be genuinely present within it, that a moment might hold within its brief duration something that the forward motion of existence normally forecloses. The plunge toward the end of all possibilities briefly suspended. The well-made image reaches for exactly this — not a record of an experience from a fleetingly brief life but an experience in itself, self-contained and inexhaustible. The eye, as Merleau-Ponty understood it, opens the soul to the joyous realm of things. The well-made image holds that opening ajar: a playground for the eye, outside of time.