A fish-eye view of the world

The reality we cook up is quite distinct from what actually exists. By this we also seem to posit that with reality there could be more than one version of the truth: an objective unchanging reality – the Kantian thing-in-itself - ontologically akin to mathematics; and then there is the reality we actually perceive which is subject however to constraints borne of both nature and nurture.When I have a camera in my hand I am like one of those small pesky dogs: I snap, snap, snap all the time. But this profligate output rarely translates to good quality. There is always some blemish with my photos: either they are out of focus or the sun is behind the subject - so ill-composed that I cannot even pass it off as a silhouette - or part of the head has been guillotined or, more often than not, a mix of all of these in the same shot.I therefore recently bought myself a DSLR camera in the hope that it will help me with learning to take better pictures. As part of this exercise in self-improvement, I have also been reading a number of photography magazines and trawling the net. One common theme to most of the advice they offer is to not hesitate to use photo editing software to “enhance” your picture. For example, where the colors are not as vivid as one would like, you could increase their intensity using the software. Or, you could crop unwanted bits from the image and add bells and whistles like vignetting or selective coloring. Virtually no member of the cognoscenti advises leaving the photo as is: it would seem that there is nothing wrong with - or you don’t have to feel bad about - augmenting a picture you may not have got right in the first instance. My initial reaction to this recommendation of taking a quick refuge behind post-production gear was one of cynicism on two grounds: firstly, such software helps paper over your lack of skills. Secondly - perhaps more importantly - by suggesting that the picture you took is imperfect or not good enough you could be inferring that what is out there (or at least what we can see of it) is also somehow etiolated or, worse, incomplete or flawed.

I recently took a photo of a set of grass trees we have in our backyard. It was one of my “test shots” solely for exploring some features of the DSLR, including the quaintly named toy camera effect. The end result was that the object I was focussing mainly on (namely, the grass trees) came out magnified while the surrounding scenery got a bit attenuated. It is rather similar to what appears in the mirror in van Eyck’s brilliant painting from 1434,The Arnolfini Portrait. 

Jan van Eyck, The Arnolfini Portrait, 1434.

(Of course, any such resemblance to such great art was wholly unintended.) Some call this effect of deliberate distortion a fish-eye view. (By the way, how did scientists work out how the world looks to a fish? Wouldn’t their conclusions be subject also to the lacunae in perception that American philosopher Thomas Nagel discussed in his famous essay on the mind-body problem, What is it like to be a bat?)

It is clear therefore that I can use technology to transform a picture into one that could be quite different from what I saw with my own eyes. For instance, I could use “panorama stitching” and combine a number of images to show a field of view considerably wider than that of the human eye. It would appear that there is some lack of truth-telling when it comes to our photographs. My disdain for photo-shopping at the outset was perhaps triggered by this realisation. In other words, the reality we cook up is quite distinct from what actually exists. By this we also seem to posit that with reality there could be more than one version of the truth: an objective unchanging reality – the Kantian thing-in-itself - ontologically akin to mathematics; and then there is the reality we actually perceive which is subject however to constraints borne of both nature and nurture. On top of this, the camera presents a vision – even before we modify it further – which may be considerably different to these two versions of reality.

This situation could lead to a Borgesian labyrinth of realities where their differences could be too subtle to distinguish. Some novelists have used this device of an assemblage of realities as an intriguing literary device to keep the reader guessing as to which is the main story and which the fiction within that. An interesting example is in Philip Roth’s novel Exit Ghost in which the narrator is also writing a play about his relationship with one of the characters in the book. Another book that uses a similar trick is Beatrice and Virgil by Yann Martel. This book is about a play, written by a taxidermist, whose protagonists are a donkey and a monkey. 

Picasso was fond of saying “I don’t paint what I see, I paint what I know.” (Schama, 36). Frank Auerbach, the German-born English painter, elaborated on this by noting that people “don’t want to see something they know about already, they don’t want to have a programme presented to them of something they believe in or approve of, they want this amazing thing they haven’t thought of before.” (Elwes, 76). Given this, is it just possible – however implausible it may seem – that what we present via a photograph is in fact a more accurate version of reality compared to what we capture with the naked eye?

But no more time for such speculation, though: I better begin working on my exposure compensation skills. My wife tells me that a photo I took recently was so bad that she could barely recognise herself in it.

REFERENCES:

Elwes, James and David Killen. “The secret structure of things.” Prospect. August 2012.

Schama, Simon. "Rembrandt's Ghost." The New Yorker. 26 Mar. 2007.