Pitiless Critique

I take Fiertel's criticism seriously. Regarding this still life he writes:

I have to again emphasize it needs cropping...what can I tell ya...the space around the form is ignored and must be a positive ingredient and not just a tray holding the cookie...I realise that you like the hardness of the overall form and background and this is even more the reason to deal with the curvilinear shapes in relationship with the edge of the rectangle to contrast it against the tough surfaces of the background and object. It is tricky working with a diagonal for sure. In my mind's eye I imagine the shape would work flipped horizontally and parallel to the sides...of course, that is strictly of personal taste in this respect as there is no reason that a diagonal should or could not work...just my take on it. Nonetheless, there is too much space left vacant and uninvolved in the complex shape of the forms. It is not like using a vacuum space to bounce against positive space...This is more like what I have called the oreo on the plate. A printmaker would start scratching away on the background and make it a part of of the surface rather than it just being there.

My reply:

Welllll... I studied the pic again last night and today but must admit I don't see how to crop this one tighter. Of course I understand and even agree with your points, but maybe there's a difference in gestalt or something. I just don't see it.

True enough that seeing is far more than the mechanical action of the eyes. And how different it is for different people. Most people hardly see at all, though they receive the same input you and I do. Few ever notice their floaters or the degeneration of their vitreous or even incipient cataracts. They just tell the doctor they can't seem to read signs as far away as they used to, or they get headaches after watching TV, or there are halos around lights. It's not a matter of acuity, I think – they simply don't see. But for some of us, not fancy-pants artists but just plain us-folks, certain forms and textures and juxtapositions and compositions actually arrest the eye and catch the attention like a fish, I mean like catching a fish, having hooked it in through some reticular formation in the brain, who knows how, but it happens, even as music takes over the brain and squeezes drugs out of it like squeezing a sponge.

If I make myself clear.

Anyway, from time to time somebody asks me how to do photography, and how come their pictures of flowers don't look as good as mine even though they have the same camera. Naturally I always tell them it's necessary to learn how to See. Because people figure they want to take a picture so they pick up the camera and raise it to their eye, and they have no idea where the light is coming from, or how much contrast there is in the scene, and they haven't noticed that the thing they want to photograph is standing in front of a bunch of junk and it looks like a lamp is sticking out of Aunt Mamie's head. Their personal internal point-and-shoot viewing apparatus is set to full automatic, and they don't see the things in the picture that the camera will record with pitiless precision.

By the same token, at least in America nearly every charming little town or picturesque scene is spoiled by the ever-present but never-noticed phone poles and light poles and power lines and other apparatus held up in the air like so many monuments to butt-ugliness. And people don't see them. I'm convinced of this. They really don't, just as they don't hear the Musak in an office that would drive me right around the bend in about thirty minutes.

That inability to ignore things is a sickness of some kind, but many people I know have it, and they tend to be the "creative" types. On the other hand I never notice stuff that Chris always does, like whether or not somebody has a new hairdo or a new color nail polish. Shit, I can hardly recognize my own acquaintances when I see them face to face – in the extreme case, BTW, that's an illness called prosopagnosia – T.H. Lawrence had it, couldn't identify his own friends and family till they said something. More evidence that seeing goes beyond sucking in photons and turning them into nerve impulses.

Oh well.