All the threads lately about the “subjectivity of art” are, naturally, provoking a lot of frustration and bewilderment, so I thought one about the “physiology of the eye” might provide a settling influence – though I recognize that’s a tall order.
Here are a couple of interesting views from people we know, and I’d enjoy hearing your reactions…
The camera, AA says in The Camera, is “analogous” but not “identical” to the eye, and he then offers a few first principles about how the eye actually works:
“The camera, for example, does not concentrate on the center of its field of view as the eye does, but sees everything within its field with about equal clarity. The eye scans the subject to take it all in, while the camera (usually) records it whole and fixed. Then there is the film, which has a range of sensitivity that is only a fraction of the eye’s. Later steps, development, printing, etc., contribute their own specific characteristics to the final photographic image.”
I’ve also come across the following piece by art critic Robert Hughes who has his own claims about the eye. The following remarks (from The Shock of the New) lead-up to his discussion of Cezanne, but like AA, he wants to establish some first principles about how the biological eye works:
“Look at an object: your eye is never still. It flickers, involuntarily restless, from side to side. Nor is your head still in relation to the object; every movement brings a fractional shift in its position, which results in a miniscule different of aspect. The more you move, the bigger the shifts and differences become. If asked to, the brain can isolate a given view, frozen in time; but its experience of the world outside the eye is more like a mosaic than a perspective set-up, a mosaic of multiple relationships, none of them (as far as vision is concerned) wholly fixed. Any sight is a sum of glimpses.”
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It seems to me that Ansel Adams and Robert Hughes want to make the most simple and objective claims about the physiological eye, before going on with their instructive work – but can one reconcile their claims? One of my initial reactions is that while AA says the eye “scans,” Hughes would “roll his eyes” at the claim that it “concentrates on the center of its field of view.” Just not possible, one might hear him reply. Likewise, AA might be skeptical about all of Hughes’ talk about “mosaics.”
Or, perhaps the correspondence between their views is greater than any difference.
How would you clarify the matter?
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