Tangents
The Sense<i> of Sight </i>
We see what we want to. Photo: Ihtisham Kabir
The incident took place several years ago. On a sunny winter morning I was riding my bicycle in Gulshan. As I neared an intersection a rickshaw driver starting a turn drove straight into me. I swerved to avoid him and fell with my cycle into a roadside ditch. Luckily I was unhurt. The rickshaw completed its turn and continued as if nothing had happened. I angrily shouted after the driver: “Can't you look where you are going?” Hearing this, he momentarily turned his head towards me. It was then that I noticed he was missing one eye. My anger evaporated instantly. After all, how could I be angry at one who was deprived - even partially - of the sense of sight, our most precious gift? More than any other sense, sight imparts richness, beauty and depth to our lives. Some of life's greatest pleasures - and pains - come from seeing. The sight of daybreak and sunset, nature, birds, and of course our beloved ones fill us with happiness. But seeing suffering, destruction or death gives us immense pain, particularly if close ones are involved. Sight is the most important sense, yet we understand its workings only partially. When light falls on the eye, millions of receptors called rods and cones capture and transmit this information to the brain, which builds a three-dimensional representation from that information. No computer can reproduce this unimaginably complex process. But that has not stopped visual artists. Over centuries, they have mastered how to choose and present their subject to the viewer so that the mundane, the fleeting, the near-invisible becomes significant, memorable and compelling - all thanks to our sense of sight. For a photographer, the apparently simple process of selection - that is, choosing what to photograph - becomes difficult because of the way we see. The eye captures the entire scene in front of us and sends it to the brain. The brain filters out unnecessary details and lets us focus on those details that attract us most. So we see what we want to see. The camera, on the other hand, records everything, including parts that our brain discards. A novice photographer may see a beautiful scene - for example, two children playing, a colourful flower, a golden sunset - and take its picture, only to be disappointed later when he looks at it enlarged. When taking the picture, the photographer's brain had automatically filtered out irrelevant details. But the camera faithfully recorded everything, including the parent's feet near the children, the leaves and broken branches obscuring the edges of the flower, and the half-finished ugly multi-story building set against the western sky. But if this frustrates them, photographers can also turn selection into a powerful tool. For example, they can choose to photograph a small detail of a larger scene in a way that gives it a loud, resonant voice. This can lead the viewer into a largely unexplored world, allowing him to see things that his normal visual selection had filtered out from him.
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