ABSTRACT
THE central concern of visualisation is that of accounting for the relationshipbetween the photographer’s everyday perception when compared with how thescene or event will appear as a flat, still, visual image, divorced from its original context. Rather than recording the scene that you see, the camera records the pattern of light that the scene reflects or emits. In contrast to making an image of a threedimensional physical world, the camera makes its image from the light that the physical world reflects. Ernst Gombrich (1975), for example in his paper ‘Mirror and Map’, in pointing out some of the consequences for visual representation, distinguishes between these two modes of recording. The photograph records visual phenomena that alter as the light changes, in contrast to a map which plots more permanent features of the terrestrial layout. For example, shadows do not cause us problems as we walk around the environment, but when we take a photograph such intangible and ephemeral phenomena appear as solid and permanent elements of the photograph. As we have already discussed, our systems of visual perception have developed to account for the stable features of the environment with less concern for the illusory or impermanent characteristics. So, seeing photographically involves imagining the scene from the unnatural static viewpoint of the camera. It means that the photographer must become especially aware of the light and other visual qualities of the scene. ‘Seeing photographically’, according to Edward Weston,
is [the photographer] learning to see his subject matter in terms of the capabilities of his tools and processes, so that he can instantaneously translate the elements and values in a scene before him into the photograph he wants to make.
