Choices/ Approaches

It is my intention to add material to this blog on a fairly regular basis.  It will probably be useful to some and, at times, a bit presumptuous or even obvious to others.  One of the things I have learned after thirty five years in the classroom however is not to assume anything.  We all view the world selectively, and therein lies a good part of the problem.  Our eyes have been trained to see, and or frequently ignore much of what goes on around us.  The old saying is that, "familiarity breeds contempt".  That translates into something quite simple.  Once we have seen it, categorized it and put it in a little box in our mind we tend to not really see it again.  I would like to use this forum to talk a bit about vision and what I call "visual literacy"—to look and look again perhaps with fresh eyes and explore the possibilities.  The first thing that we need to reckon with is that the camera and the eye see differently.  The eye sees to a series of fixed points and tends to "weed out", if you will, non-essential information.  The camera sees to a flat field and records everything that falls within that rectangle.  The first challenge, therefore, is to learn to see what the camera sees.

The photo pictured here is a portion of a sculpture which sits outside the Cannon Center in downtown Memphis.  It's been there for a number of years and of the thousands of people who have undoubtedly seen it, very few have probably ever looked closely or given it a second thought.