Most serious photographers spend far more time making photographs than looking at them. This seems natural — photography is a practice of making, and making requires time in the field, at the computer, in the darkroom. But it produces a gradual impoverishment of the eye, which needs images to look at as much as it needs subjects to photograph, and which develops its capacities through sustained encounter with the work of others as much as through its own making.
The photographers in this book did not develop their visual intelligence in isolation. Koudelka had Cartier-Bresson and the Czech photographic tradition. Leiter had the New York School painters and the Japanese prints in his apartment. Strand had Alfred Stieglitz and the galleries of 291. Atget had the Paris of the Barbizon painters and the early pictorialists. The eye is formed partly by what it has been shown — by the images it has lived with, returned to, argued with, been changed by. And the formation of the eye through encounter with the work of others is not a preliminary stage to be completed before the real work begins. It is the real work, and it continues for as long as the practice does.
This chapter is about the habits and disciplines of looking that support and deepen a serious photographic practice. Not looking at your own work — that is the subject of Chapter Nineteen — but looking at the work of others: in museums, in books, in the specific kind of sustained, solitary encounter with a single image that this book has been modelling throughout and that most photographers, in their rush to consume more images, rarely allow themselves.
The museum is an underused resource for photographers, partly because photographers tend to think of it as a place for painting rather than photography, and partly because the conditions of museum-going — the crowds, the signage, the guided tours, the audio guides, the sense that the correct approach to a great work is one of informed reverence — are actively hostile to the kind of looking this book is arguing for. Informed reverence is a way of confirming what you already know about an image. It produces recognition, not encounter.
The practice this chapter recommends is different: go to the museum alone, early, on a weekday if possible, and choose one room. Not the room with the most famous works, necessarily, but the room that contains works you know less well — the room of minor masters, the room of prints and drawings, the room of photographs. Sit down in front of one work and do not move for twenty minutes. Do not read the label. Do not consult the audio guide. Do not think about what you know about the artist. Look at what is in front of you — the specific arrangement of forms and light and color and space on this particular surface — and attend to what it does, to what the eye is drawn toward and away from, to what returns after the first pass and what does not.
Twenty minutes is long enough for the initial scan to have completed itself and for something else to begin: the second and third pass, in which the eye starts to notice what the first pass missed, to find the structural relationships that are not immediately obvious, to begin to feel the image’s particular quality of organization or resistance. It is in these passes that the eye develops. Not in the first encounter, which is too close to recognition to teach anything, but in the sustained encounter, in which the image begins to yield what it withheld on the first viewing.
Twenty minutes in front of one work teaches more than two hours moving through a gallery. The first is an encounter. The second is a survey. Surveys do not change anything.
The works that repay this kind of sustained attention are not necessarily the famous ones — though the famous ones often do, for reasons that their fame tends to obscure. They are the works that resist the first pass: that do not yield immediately to comprehension, that send the eye back rather than releasing it. In a museum, these are often the works you might otherwise walk past: the landscape by a painter you do not recognize, the photograph of an unremarkable place in an unremarkable light, the small interior that has been in the collection so long it has become invisible. The resistance of these works to immediate comprehension is not evidence of their mediocrity. It may be the beginning of their significance.
The photobook is the other primary resource, and in some ways the more important one, because the conditions it offers — solitude, silence, the ability to return at will, the possibility of sustained engagement over days and weeks — are more compatible with the kind of looking this book is arguing for than the museum’s public conditions.
A serious engagement with a photobook means reading it at least three times. The first time, let the sequence carry you: do not stop, do not linger, let the pacing the photographer and editor intended work on you. Notice what you respond to, what you resist, where the sequence feels right and where it feels forced. The second time, stop at the images that return from the first reading — the ones that stayed with you, the ones that troubled you, the ones you are not sure you understood. Spend time with each of them before moving on. The third time, look at the images you passed over in the first two readings — the ones that did not immediately claim your attention — and ask what they are doing that you missed. In a well-edited book, there are no filler images. Every photograph is there for a reason that the sequence makes visible, and the images that seemed least interesting are sometimes doing the most structural work.
The visual journal is the third practice, and the most private. Not a sketchbook — though sketching is a valuable discipline for developing the eye ’s understanding of form and space — but a written journal of visual responses: accounts of images encountered, what they did, what they withheld, what they produced in the viewer over time.
The discipline of writing about an image forces a precision of attention that looking alone does not always produce. When you commit to writing about what you saw — not what the image is about in any art-historical sense, but what it did, formally, to your attention and your feeling — you discover very quickly what you actually noticed and what you only thought you noticed. The vague sense of being moved by an image is much easier to sustain than the written account of what specifically produced that movement. Writing demands specificity. Specificity demands attention. Attention, returned to habitually over weeks and months and years, develops the eye.
The visual journal is also, over time, a record of how your eye changes: what you responded to at twenty-five and what you respond to at forty, what drew you in and what resisted you at different stages of the practice, what you were capable of seeing when you began and what you have learned to see since. This is not nostalgia for earlier phases of development. It is evidence of the practice working — of the eye genuinely developing, genuinely deepening, genuinely becoming capable of more than it was. The journal makes the development visible, which is itself a form of encouragement during the long periods when the development feels imperceptible.
None of these practices — the sustained museum encounter, the three-pass reading of the photobook, the visual journal — will produce good photographs directly. They will produce, over time, an eye that is more capable of noticing what is worth photographing, more attentive to the formal qualities that make images work, more patient with the world’s continuous and unspectacular offering. That eye, brought to the camera, will produce better photographs than any number of technique manuals or composition guides could generate. The camera is not the beginning of the practice. The eye is. And the eye is developed, first and last, through looking.