Why do we see what we see?

There have been worldwide discussions on the color of a dress. Thousands of people, including my wife, saw the dress as gold and white even though the designer of the dress, Peter Christodoulou, said the dress was blue and black. In the grand scheme of things, the color of the dress doesn’t matter, but it points to a bigger question: Why do we see things the way we do?

As a photography instructor, the first lesson I teach students is how to see. Most people don’t understand that the quality of light, the intensity of light, and even the color of light will determine the way we see the dress or subject, but also the emotion we attach to it as well.

Along with light, our religion, lack of religion, parents, guardians, environment, education, life experiences, and sounds often play an important part on how we view subjects.

In the late 1980’s, I attended a very expensive wedding. The bride and groom had decided to let the groom’s Uncle Joe take the wedding photos to save money. The wedding and reception took place in a church that had fluorescent lights. Those lights at the time of the ceremony gave everything a green color and the only way to correct that green in photographs would have been to put a magenta filter over the lens and a green gel over the flash. You see magenta is the opposite of green and it corrects the light to white in a photograph. Also, in order for a flash to work in this scenario, it would have had to produce green light instead of white light. Uncle Joe didn’t make any of these adjustments so; the very expensive white dress and costly white cake were green in all the photographs.

In 1978, my grandfather’s retirement photo appeared in the local newspaper. The picture was so black that only his eyes and teeth were visible. For most people in my small town, the picture represented another retiring black mill worker, but to me the picture showed a lack of respect for the most important man in my life. It was common in those days and decades prior to that, images of black people to be under exposed and printed too dark. Those images help to fuel the notion that blacks were dumb, evil, and lazy. The emotion that’s attached to a bad photograph can have lifelong implications if someone attaches his or her self-esteem to that image.

The young, female writer who took that photograph of my grandfather was not trying to be disrespectful or racist, but that’s how I a teenager at the time viewed the image. After talking with her, I quickly learned that the image was a result of very bad photography skills, very bad darkroom skills, and too much ink on the printing plate.

That image was one of the key reasons I became a photographer.

Now as a photography instructor, I make sure that my students understand that in order to become a good photographer they need to know the technical part of photography along with the creative part, and understand the emotions that will be attached to the photograph. Because viewers will see the photograph differently based on the emotion that the photograph generates inside them. They will “see” the photograph differently.