Thinking Critically Using Visual Thinking

There is a quotation I love that goes:

"All there is to thinking is seeing something noticeable, which makes you see something you weren't noticing, which makes you see something that isn't even visible." Norman McClean, from "A River Runs Through It"

I apply this to much of what I do in terms of my own life and in terms of poetry and photography both of which are searches for the invisible. The art of "seeing" is a search to find what it is that you never noticed. This happens to me all the time. I can be driving down the same street at the same time every day to and from work for weeks, months, and even years, then one day, I will look and notice something that wasn't there until I noticed it. This is when I stop the car, get out, take out my note pad and my camera and set up my tripod and I record in words what I am seeing and how I am seeing it and when and where noting the light and shadows, the f-stop and the shutter speed and the ISO and if I had to use exposure compensation. Then, when I get home, I download the raw files and start working on them in Aperture or Photoshop and making corrections and changes and saving versions in color and black and white. Then I make a back up disc to a DVD and I upload the keeper images to my online databank and to my website for backup. And I make a print, finally. that is the final product. I believe that the photograph is now the print, printed on paper and kept in digital file form online.

A year later, I will pull down the raw file from the DVD or from my online data storage, and look again. When this happens I begin to see things that I never noticed and the experience of "seeing" happens all over again. I've been doing this lately because I have a show coming up of all my Paterson work in color and black and white, over twenty years worth. And I am amazed that I had image files of things that I put aside and never thought much of until I got to "see" them again for the first time.

How does this fit with critical thinking? Well, for one, critical thinking does not mean searching for one right answer. There may be many answers. Your best answers are those that analyze and articulate your responses in light of supporting evidence. This is critical thinking.

So my critical thinking is going to be different than your critical thinking, because my answers have to answer for who I am.

How we view ourselves in relation to the world around us is very complex. We probably have an image of who we are that we carry within ourselves most of the time, but we are likely to project a different personality according to the situations (home, work, school, among friends, etc.) in which we find ourselves. Depending on our relationships with them, the people we know are also likely to describe us very differently. Our families, friends, casual acquaintances, employers, and teachers may experience who we are in very different ways.

Connecting through experience:

The self images we carry with us into adulthood may be formed during childhood. Try to remember how you felt about yourself as a child and compare that self-image with how you see yourself now.

For this first assignment, I ask all of you to post a self-portrait in words and pictures. Upload a photograph that is a self-portrait meaning that it contains you in some way but you can't be in the photograph. It can be your shoes and clothes hanging in your closet and you can describe the clothes and the items in the closet that connect you to who you are. It could be your car, the interior of the car, all the things in it and what they mean to you. It could be your bedroom, your desk, the things on your wall and why they are there...what do they mean to you. How are they you?

After you upload a self-portrait image in jpeg format, you must write two fully developed paragraphs. In the first paragraph, describe what you see. Just list what is in the photograph and tell us what it is and what it is like, the colors, etc. Describe what what is there....this is a picture in words. The second paragraph is very different. This is what you don't see. And this is the Norman McClean quotation from the top of this page, noticing something that you didn't notice because it is invisible but making it noticeable. This paragraph is about how you feel about what you see. What feelings do you have when you look at the self-portrait of your room, car, clothes, bed, etc? What emotions do you attach to these items. Do they have meaning? How important are they? Why do you have them? How do they make you feel? Are you saddened by the things around you? Are you comforted? Do they make you remember people and places and times in your life?

Give it your best shot....

Prof H

Ways of Seeing: Thomas Berger

Selected Quotations from Thomas Berger's "The Art of Seeing"

Seeing comes before words.

What we know affects what we see.

We only see what we notice. It is an act of choice.

We never look at just one thing,
but at a relationship between things and ourselves.

All images are man made.

An image is a piece of sight that has been detached from space/time.

Every image embodies a “way” of seeing something. And our “seeing” depends on our way of looking.

Images represent something “absent.”

When we see a landscape we situate ourselves in it.

Compositional unity of an image contributes to its power.

Perspective makes the single eye (the God-eye) the center of the visible world
(but a god who could only be in one place at one time.

The camera showed that the notion of time passing was inseparable from the experience of the visual (except in paintings).

What you saw depended upon where you were when.

What you saw was relative to your position in time and space.

It was no longer possible to imagine everything converging to the human eye as the vanishing point of infinity.

The camera—and more particularly the movie camera—demonstrated that there was no center.

The invention of the camera changed the way people saw.

The visible came to mean something different to them.

This was immediately reflected in painting.

The invention of the camera also changed the way people saw painting.

The uniqueness of every painting was once part of the uniqueness of the place where it resided.

When the camera reproduces an image it destroys the uniqueness of its image.

As a result its meaning changes, multiplies and fragments into many meanings.

A televised image enters the atmosphere of the viewer’s home, his memories, his furniture, wallpaper, etc.

The televised and reproduce image lends its meaning to their meaning.

The meaning of the original no longer lies in what it uniquely says but in what it uniquely is.

It is defined as an object whose value depends upon its rarity (take the Mona Lisa reproduced and mass marketed on post cards, posters, bags and tee shirts).

A woman’s presence in an image is always different than a man’s.

Men look at women. Women watch themselves being looked at.

Kenneth Clark in his book on The Nude maintains that to be naked is to be without clothes, whereas the nude is a form of art.

The Art of Seeing

Sometimes I previsualize an image before taking a photograph. An image can have a powerful effect on the imagination. The image on the left is a painting of the Whitestone Bridge that I had seen a couple of years ago in a museum in Buffalo, New York, at The Albright-Knox Gallery. I had already started shooting bridges and I was entranced by the graceful line and uncluttered simplicity and beauty of this image. I stood and studied its composition for a long time. I took a photograph of the painting which is what you have before you. I remember thinking at the time that I want to get a shot of this bridge. I wasn't yet familiar with the Whitestone Bridge. I had only been working a year or so and I had taken the Verrazano, the Bayonne, the Brooklyn, the Manhattan, the Queensboro, and the George Washington bridges, but not this one. It would be another two years before I would get out there to shoot the Whitestone and I forgot about this painting, but something of its composition remained with me unconsciously. I spent two days shooting the Whitestone from both sides of the East River, from the Bronx side in misty, rainy weather, and on the Queens side on a day of fair weather clouds and lots of blue sky. As I drove up to the toll and paid the $5.50 to cross, I reached for my camera that I had ready and waiting on the passenger seat, and with my left hand on steering wheel and my right hand holding the camera up to my eye and looking through the viewfinder, I began pressing the shutter as I rode up and up and over the long span of the bridge. I was going as slowly as I could. My photograph on the right is the result of one of those frames. Now that I look and now that I compare my photograph with the painting, I see how influenced I was.

I realize that photography had a major influence on painting from the time of its invention in the mid-19th century. It freed painters to paint other things and helped give birth to Impressionism since painters no longer had to paint realistically. But later on, painting would influence photography as is the case with many of the earlier pictorial photographers such as Cameron, Stieglitz and Steichen. The two mediums are constantly working alongside each other since at the end of the day picture making is picture making.

I love how the bridge in the painting tilts skyward at such a steep incline that it looks as if it could take you right up and into the clouds. In my imagining the Whitestone bridge from just looking at the painting, I imagined that it might have been that steep somehow, and it was that quality that I was unconsciouly after in my pre-visualization of what I thought the bridge would look like. I think that I was pretty close given that the two towers in my shot are lined up exactly the way they line up in the painting. There is no way that I could photograph an incline that steep because it isn't there in reality. It was there for the painter in his imagination and I don't know if the painter was painting from a sketch or a photograph, or from standing there. It would be pretty difficult to stand there and paint, unless the bridge were closed. I had to be in a car and that was risky.