Geometry or Anything and the Sky

“I see dead people…they’re everywhere.”

That line, from M. Night’s ‘Sixth Sense’, is often how I feel about how I see things visually. But it isn’t the folks who have shuffled off this mortal coil who occupy my vision, its geometric shapes – circles, rectangles, triangles and lines.

It wasn’t always there. At first, it was just an exercise. I think it was from Freeman Patterson’s book ‘Photography and the Art of Seeing’. It was explained (and I’m paraphrasing) that seeing things as baser structures would help with composition. It’s not a building but a rectangle. It’s not a pine tree but a triangle – that sort of thing.  You were to ask yourself, where should I put that rectangle when I frame this up?  If I put it into the corner of my frame and turn the camera, I can make a triangle out of it. Patterson imparted that the naming or “labelling” of the object is what put some obstacles in the way to using it more objectively in some composition that was going to include it. The name or label was a concept that led to limitations in perception and our ability to leverage things with our imagination.*

You know those visual puzzles where you see things upon first blush and then, if you look deeper (or someone informs you of it), you see something else that you didn’t notice at first; and how, from that realization on, you can’t ‘un-see’ that thing once it is revealed? That’s often how I am when it comes to seeing common objects with names nowadays; trees, buildings, cable wires – I see their geometry. The degree to which that visual deconstruction occurs fluctuates but it’s often there for me.  And, not just the actual objects as visual building blocks but how I can use the borders of the image space to create them. A clear blue sky becomes a rectangle when lined up in a frame. I’m mentally lining up geometries when I look at a scene before my eyes and I feel stuck some times.

I can’t un-see the dead objects.  And, they’re everywhere.

* That’s probably an injustice to how eloquent Patterson is in his descriptions about the mind’s eye. Get the book and read it.