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Photographic Practices,
Darkroom Logics:
A Glossary of Terms.“IMAGINE an eye unruled by man-made laws of perspective, an eye unprejudiced by compositional logic, an eye which does not respond to the name of everything but which must know each object encountered in life through an adventure of perception.
[…]
To see is to retain — to behold. Once vision may have been given — that which seems inherent in the infant’s eye, an eye which reflects the loss of innocence more eloquently than any other human feature, an eye which soon learns to classify sights, an eye which mirrors the movement of the individual towards death by its increasing inability to see.”
—STAN BRAKHAGE Metaphors on Vision1
For the first several months of our lives, we see only light. Or, rather, we cannot see in theway that you are seeing as you read this paper. From birth until about four months, our optic
mechanics are not developed enough to translate the visual world into colors; instead, we see in
black, white, and scales of grey until our rods learn to identify color. The same goes for objects: 2
infants see the world first as light and shadow, then as distant blobs, and finally as distinguishable
objects. They also, in their youth, understand best in proximity, seeing most clearly 8-15 inches
away from the objects or subjects upon which they gaze. This advantages children to see their
parents or caregivers, as they lean into cribs or breastfeed their children, before they can truly see,
by the adult metrics of understanding, anything else in the world. But, before those 8-15 inches
come into focus, we perceive the world in grayed, morphing auras of light and dark.
We might understand from an infant’s visual development that we must learn to see. Only
after we have mastered those delicate optic mechanics may we learn to see socially. With focus,
the visual world takes on universes of meaning; that set of light and dark becomes articulated
into mother and father; those modes of identification expand into man and woman; racial category;
hierarchies of value; and eventually, they become a marked distinction between self and other.
There is a moment when the world, as perceived from a child’s eyes, slips from being an
amorphous, unidentifiable, alogical zone where no object, subject, permanence, color, or
proximity is distinguishable, into being a world of and about binaries: self and other, man and
woman, inside and outside, good and bad, safe and dangerous. As people far past that delicate
moment of coming into our visual capabilities, and as participants and students of that social
world — which takes the Manichean dramatics of binaried looking from the personal to the
global, and reinforces them into social meaning — it becomes our duty to identify and reconsider
which elements of our sight truly contribute to individual universes of meaning, and which ones