Learning How to Un-See — Cliff Guren

In John Berger’s Ways of Seeing, Berger describes the relation between what we see and what we know, more precisely arguing that what we know impacts what we see (and vice versa). Talking about the ubiquitous abundance of images and their increasingly ephemeral, insubstantial, and available meaning, he says, “If the new language of images were used

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This act of “really looking” is deceptive. It requires an almost “unlooking” to see closely, a kind of defocusing. Because: We tend to see in groups, not details. We scan an image or scene for the gist, but miss a richness of particulars. I suspect this has only gotten worse in recent years as our Daily Processed Information density has increased, ... See more