(Leica D-Lux 5)
To continue from yesterday, there is still an unanswered question: What actually are we learning in photography?
Again, the final answer is a matter of context. The perceptions of what photography is for and the self-assessments of one's photographic skills carry a great deal of weight in forming the answer. If I need to give just one ultimate answer, it is that photography requires us to learn to neither believe what we see nor see what we believe. The learning process takes three parts.
First, psychologically, it is to learn to transcend duality in interpreting the happenings around us. This takes an attitude to make the known unknown as Einstein put it or, as the modern version goes, to take the truth as prejudice. For the latter, I borrowed from Eugene Smith but am not referring to manipulating images – it is that if we use subjectivity and assume "truth" as adulterated, our empathy will begin to take an increasing measure of control over our dualistic thinking. While we enlarge our empathy, we can find more previously unknown connections between different elements involved in a scene. From there, we will reflect such a thinking in the photos which therefore shows evidence of advancement to a higher level.
This much for the answer for today. To be continued.
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