Assignments
in Seeing

Choose a single photograph or painting from this book — or from any monograph you own — and spend one uninterrupted hour with it. No phone. No notes for the first thirty minutes. Sit with the image in whatever way feels natural: close, far, at an angle. Let the eye move without directing it. After thirty minutes, write for the remaining thirty — not analysis, not art-historical context, but a record of what the eye did: where it went first, what it returned to, what it skirts, what it finds newly each time it passes. Write in the present tense, as though describing what is happening now.

At the end of the hour, read what you wrote. You will find that the written record contains observations you did not consciously make during the looking. This is the exercise working.

Choose a location within fifty meters of your front door. It should be unremarkable — the more unremarkable the better. A stretch of pavement, a wall, a patch of garden, a view from a window. Photograph it every day for two weeks, at the same time of day, from the same position. One frame per day. No cropping afterward.

At the end of two weeks, lay out all fourteen frames together and look at them as a sequence. Notice what changes and what stays the same. Notice which days produced images you want to look at and which days produced images you want to discard, and ask honestly whether the difference is in the world or in you.

Take a hundred photographs — from any recent shoot, or made specifically for this exercise — and edit them down to twelve. Not the twelve best individual photographs. The twelve that belong together: that form a coherent world, that share a quality of attention, that could constitute the beginning of a body of work. You are not allowed to use the word “interesting” as a criterion. Ask instead: is this true to the world I was seeing? Does this belong?

When you have your twelve, sequence them. The sequence should have an opening, a development, and an ending — not a narrative, but a movement. Look at the sequence for three days before deciding it is finished. It will change.

Choose a photobook by a photographer whose work you do not know well. Read it three times over three days, following the method described in Chapter Seventeen: first for the sequence, second for the images that return, third for the images you initially passed over. After the third reading, write one page — not a review, not a description, but an account of what this photographer appears to be looking for. What quality of the world does their eye seek? What formal problem are they solving, across the whole body of work, that no single image fully resolves?

Choose a single color — not a hue range, a specific color: not “red” but the specific red of a London bus, not “blue” but the specific blue of an overcast winter sky. For one month, photograph only when that color is structurally present in the frame — not as decoration, but as a weight-bearing element without which the composition would collapse. Make as many or as few photographs as the month offers. At the end, look at what you have.

The exercise is not about the color. It is about training the eye to see color as structure rather than description, to recognize when a color is doing compositional work rather than merely appearing in the scene.

Take any ten photographs from your own archive that you consider among your strongest. Print them, or open them on screen at full size. Cover the left half of each with a piece of paper. Study the right half. Then cover the right half and study the left. Ask, for each image: which half can the image survive without? Which half contains the structural weight? Which half is doing the compositional work and which is context?

The images that cannot survive the loss of either half are your best images. The images that survive the loss of one half entirely are images you may want to reconsider — or to reframe, if the surviving half is strong enough to stand alone.

Spend one full day in a place you would normally photograph — a city, a landscape, a neighbourhood — without a camera of any kind. Walk. Look. Notice what your eye is drawn to and what it passes over. Notice when you feel the absence of the camera as a relief and when you feel it as a deprivation. At the end of the day, write for twenty minutes: what did you see that you would have photographed? What did you see that a photograph could not have held? What did the absence of the camera make possible that its presence would have prevented?

Find a photograph or painting that you actively dislike — one that repels you, or bores you, or that you have always found overrated. Spend thirty minutes with it. Do not try to like it. Do not try to understand why others value it. Attend, as precisely and honestly as you can, to what it is doing formally: how it is organized, what its tonal or chromatic structure is, how it handles depth and plane and weight. Write a one-page formal description — not a judgment, not a response, but a description of what is there.

At the end of the thirty minutes, ask one question: is there anything this image does that you have not yet learned to do? Not whether you want to do it. Whether you could. The answer will tell you something about the limits of your current seeing.