The Perception of Things

Unlike photography, painting has always decorated human culture.  It’s through painting that we recover the memory of how man has perceived himself as well as the environment in which he lived throughout different ages.  Rupestral (carved in stone or written on…) paintings in Val Camonica (in the Italian central Alps) are an excellent guide to understanding the perceptive evolution of those peoples who inhabited the area.  From very plain drawings depicting animals, prey dating back to the seventh millennium, the paintings and engravings of the fifth millennium, when mankind augmented hunting with agriculture, began representing not only human beings but also geometric signs like rectangles and circles which probably symbolized fields.  With the advent of the first millennium, drawings began depicting weapons, and human muscles and genitals were used to express the ideals of virility and superiority to which the commoners aspired.

Religious iconography, dating back to the late European Middle Ages, was symbolic of both the outstanding presence of religion in people’s imagery and the fact that the Church was, to painters, a client to please just because it was so powerful and rich.  Therefore, images are historical proofs, not merely of man’s evolution, but also and mostly of perception, of how the historical period was actually perceived.

As for any manifestation of human intelligence, the techniques that are used to reproduce images have benefited from an evolution that has lasted ages and ages--from rupestral engravings to photography.  If, on the one hand, technology together with handicraft improved, on the other, perception became the indispensable inner input that allowed life to be represented.  While technique can be handed down, perception belongs to the human being living within his historical context.  It’s the instinctive and peculiar expression of one’s way of being.  The comprehension and understanding of how we perceive play key roles if we want to transmit what we see through an image.  The process doesn’t make use of practice or technical experiments; it uses philosophical speculations.

History

Returning to the origins of photography, we should reload time back to Aristotle—the fourth century A.D.  After Pythagoras and Plato, Aristotle studied light, working out the theory that is considered nearest to modern thought.  Aristotle worked out studies on colors, too, on sight and perception, on the vital tangle between sensation and desire--“pulsion” as Freud would have defined it.  Aristotle maintained that we may demand water because we are thirsty, because we want to refresh ourselves, because we want to sprinkle the garden.  The demand for water meets different needs; however, it is only water.  We perceive it differently according to the urges of momentary necessities.

The same goes for what we see.  Our perception changes according to the way we are.  Our way of being is unique, like fingerprints, as is the message we can convey through our photography.  Taking photos with this perspective means making the product unique.  The result is releasing “our own” object--not just “an” object.  We should, then, become aware of our own point of view.

Recalling Aristotle and the various reasons for a demand for water, in photography we should consider that the same object can be released in several different ways--no one way is best.  However, only one can represent our own perception of the object in the best possible way.