Sounds boring I know, but there's one thing the Modernists had right, and that is- it's not what you see that matters, but how you see it.
This got me thinking.
Now, I live in an amazingly beautiful part of the world, and even though I can see it's beautiful and appreciate it thoroughly, when I get up from my train seat every day and see it through the window it has no effect on me. This is because I know exactly what is there. There's no mystery. I know that behind that group of trees is a redbrick corner shop and a telephone booth. Down that street is a delapidated house with a goat in the garden, and down the next street lives someone I went to primary school with.
I really think this is a huge part of the appeal of travelling to new places that are completely removed from your usual environment. When you are seeing new places for the first time, you don't know what lies beyond your immediate line of sight. Depending on where you are, and the sort of images you mentally link with that place through years of cultural associations, your imagination tends to fill in the gaps.
This photo might be a good example:
If someone told me this was taken somewhere in the countryside in France, not only would I believe them, but everything I associate with France would be invested in the photo. I would probably imagine that in the unseen parts of the photo is a vineyard, and to next to it are some mustachioed old Frenchmen playing chess in the sun (or something equally cliched).
But, I took this photo, and I know that the reality is not half as interesting as that. It was taken on the way to Australia's most boring, round-abouty "state" (Canberra, obviously), and there is not much else around it other than bushland.
For me, it just goes to show that with art, photography, anything visual at all, it really is all about perception. Maybe all that blah about connotations that I learned in first year was right after all.
muccibird.
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