Buffalo Bayou in the city center of Houston looks one way to strangers forming their first impression than it does to people who reside downtown or commute into work there, day after day. And of course to the people who blueprinted and brought all the building materials on the construction sites to produce the skyscrapers, the place means something different to the resident or the first-time visitor. This quote nicely sums up the way that a scene can hold different meanings simultaneously, based on the eye of the beholder: “You photograph how you see and not what you see.” [op/ed source 7 February 2020]
A person who comes to a new place, a new organization, or new relationship begins with first impressions. Sometimes a gestalt or overall vibe comes to mind, like the diffuse sense of precision and deliberateness that seems visible in a lot of the built environments and cultural landscape of the countryside or city in Japan. Then perhaps there is a dim awareness of dominant colors and textures and ratios/proportions in the shape of things designed in that place. As well, there is an impression of the scale, characteristic smells and sounds, and feeling or emotional response produced in a place: dread, joy, possibility. Taken all together these surface qualities create a background for the newcomer. Then daily experiences are remembered or recorded as foreground to that background.
Meaning attached to a place comes about in many ways: what has already taken place, what currently goes on there, and what is expected to happen there. When it comes to memory-places, what the French historian Pierre Nora wrote about (lieu de memoire), the degrees of significance that can overlap are many: meaning for a person, for a family or business, a neighborhood, a town, a district or larger region, the nation, or even something rising to the UNESCO definition of “World Heritage Site,” for example. By spelling out the differences between surface level meaning (what visitors or newcomers see) and the kinds of meaning that takes time and layers of experiences to accumulate it now becomes possible to turn this outsider or newcomer experience on its head: for the local resident to artificially pretend to view the neighborhood as a stranger might, but also for the tourist to artificially pretend to view the place as a local resident might.
In order to look at familiar places, events, and people from the experiential distance of someone with no prior (local; cultural) knowledge of the location, it is useful to go back to the bolded facets listed above: gestalt or overall vibe; the dominant colors and textures and ratios/proportions; and the impression of the scale, characteristic smells and sounds, and feeling or emotional response. What about the reverse? What sets apart the layers of memories, daily routines at present, and future expectations for the seasons and life experiences that lie ahead in that place?
The longer that a person lives in a place the deeper the roots grow and feelings of attachment will tie the person to the familiar faces, places, and events of a small radius that gradually grows wider and wider over the months and years. The person’s vision may expand: bigger knowledge base, wider awareness of families and their interconnections, and increasing emotional weight of cumulative holiday events, life experiences, and dreams of what may be coming. For a visitor to project an imaginary lifetime of meanings such as these requires a lot of creative work, but at least it is possible as barebones outlines and sketches of what may be probable if one were to be a local resident. Being able to speak and understand the language of the place is an important part of that exercise of the imagination, of course. But even when the effort involves a leap of a century or more of history (e.g. visiting a place where long-ago ancestors lived), this barebones sketch should be possible: of what a day was like, or an entire cycle of the seasons during a year, or the time-lapse playback of life events that punctuate a fully lived life. And for those with particularly active imaginations the leap of a century or more can go forward in time, to a place where plausibly one’s own descendants might be the local residents with richly detailed meaning and attachment and relationships to the place.
No matter if the imaginative exercise is past, present, or future; in one’s own language or in a land where an altogether different language makes meaning of the cultural landscape and pattern of interactions there, still the same task begins the effort: shedding the surface impressions and insights of an outsider and taking up the kinds of things that a local resident pays attention to as significant and sources to make meaningful one’s life. Those sources of meaning and consequence include a mental map of where the useful resources can be obtained (food, clothing, entertainment), what are the established ways to solve life’s small and big problems (police, courts, gift giving, home repair, medical emergency, birth, death, marriage, and so on). A local person compared to outsider has local knowledge base, wider awareness of families and their interconnections, and increasing emotional weight from the years of holiday events, life experiences, and dreams of what may be coming.
So the next time you look at a picture or you visit a place in-person, if you are a stranger, then try on the list of Local Knowledge elements listed here. It may lead to hints of what local life might mean and feel like. And if that picture or the place visited in-person is something you come to with local experience, then try on the list of Surface Impressions listed here. It may lead to hints of what those familiar experiences look like from the outside. Truly, the outsider eyes differ to the local resident eyes; for good reason, and with good results, that each may learn from the other.
Certain thoughts seem to return to the surface of my mind in slightly different form, again and again. So perhaps this note about the layered way to look at a place repeats an earlier posting, too.
Both cultural and natural landscape are in view in this frame. (author photo) 10/2019
This thought experiment gives slightly different results when you place yourself in an (1) unfamiliar location of your own society and language, compared to a (2) foreign location, compared to your own (3) hometown, either from your years of childhood and schooling, or in your present phase of life. However, no matter which situation you take as your starting place, the process of examining each facet of this composite vision, one by one, will be the same in each case.
The photo illustration here hints at the type of challenge there is to knowing a place deeply, both the local cultural meanings and memories, as well as the rhythms and process of the natural environment there. Books like Walden by H.D. Thoreau (1854), Aldo Leopold (1949) A Sand County Almanac, and Annie Dillard (1974) Pilgrim at Tinker Creek and so many of Rachel Carson’s writings delve deeply into a place and time, mostly in the absence of the built landscape of cultural meanings. Wendell Berry is another well of wonder. Many poets, too, have expressed vision tied to a place or moment that is very penetrating: Robert Frost’s love of the land, or Mary Oliver’s love of the creatures and changing seasons of life come to mind. All of these written approaches to a given natural setting make it come alive with meaning and attachment and memory or story for readers. Certainly this personal relationship to the cycles, textures, and many sorts of life form – animal or vegetable (or even mineral) – leads to a closer connection to a place.
Then there is the scientist’s appreciation for those same non-human elements, structures, processes, and behavioral patterns in a place: this can be at the level of microorganisms, the botanical world, the kingdom of fungi, or the universe of animals in air, on land, or in watery settings. For many visitors to an unfamiliar place, these natural elements are barely examined; seen, but not closely observed. Some tour company surveys list a dozen or more major intentionalities or interests when making a trip that is not business related, or caused by fleeing from disaster. These reasons to pack a bag and dwell temporarily in a strange place include things like action/adventure, practicing one’s hobby or sport, history or art (performing or visual), culture of a place (customs of food and communication, language, social life and current events, including festivals or holiday celebrations). Depending on the main goal, a person is inclined to be preoccupied by that purpose and to disregard or little regard all of the many other layers of significance and patterns of activity that comprise the totality of significance there.
When a camera is part of one’s approach to encountering and engaging with the light, landscape, and subjects in front of one’s itinerary, then a certain set of things to pay attention to will arise, while others will be downplayed or be “cropped” out of one’s mind. Street photographers may glory in the thrum of motion close at hand as colors, shapes, and subjects move into and out of intriguing conjunctions for composition and capture. Landscape photographers or videographers will be attracted to subjects revealed best in changing conditions of light. Sporting event picture-takers have a well-defined stage or arena to convey visually. Portrait artists will have fresh backgrounds and lighting to incorporate in their work. Investigative and photo essayists will select from stories they see at hand. And yet, all of those earlier realities of the ecosystem – visible as well as the parts not seen during daylight or without a strong magnifying lens – are still present and alive at the same as the subjects that fill one’s viewfinder. So, taken all together, to really truly know a place, what are all the layers of meaning to get to know?
The easiest case to imagine is a week or two in an unfamiliar place in one’s own society/language; not the sort of place for an easy day-trip for repeated visits, but a place that actually feels like a sort of expedition without easy recourse to things at home to go back and fetch. Suppose you are 300 miles away from your home and you want to know the new location deeply through active study, inquiry, reading, observing, recording, and eventually communicating to others. Here is a kind of checklist of things to do to paint a rich picture of the place. Of course, the same method could be applied to foreign places; and, for that matter, to the place within walking distance of your front door at home, although it is so easy to take daily life for granted such that one’s vision soon glazes over. And while the eyes move, the mind carelessly skims over the sights, unexamined; without reflection or contextualizing the particulars there in front of the person.
Let me take Charleston, South Carolina as my example, since it is far away from my residence. Once refreshed from the travel travail and established in lodgings for the week, the first thing to do is form some general impressions, looking out the window and making a mental note of the signature sounds and also smells of the place, the look of the light, and superficial patterns of building style, street layout, and so on. As a practical matter, some landmarks (major streets and prominent buildings or natural features) should be learned to aid in navigation and the process of spatializing one’s memories (so that scenes and subjects can be automatically associated in one’s mind’s eye with a location). Then the checklist can begin in the order most convenient to one’s interests and prior knowledge. For me in Charleston, beginning with the natural flora and fauna helps to erase the distractions of cultural clutter. Not being a biological, climatological, or geological expert, I consider all these things by imagination: hypothetically, and with a little help from Wikipedia or other sources that document the ecozone, I project onto the streets, parks, and tidal areas some of the annual cycle of tides, lifecycles of insect life, the migratory flows of creatures of land, air, and water, and also the vast array of domesticated animals alive throughout the city. As an added dimension to this mental snapshot of the natural world that intersects with the city of Charleston, perhaps I would stretch my imagination further in the time dimension. I would picture the same kinds of creatures and cycles from a generation or two earlier, and from the British colonial years and before that. Looking in the other direction, I would imagine these subjects alive in the generations after my time.
Having satisfied my appetite for the place, excluding human meanings, and filled with glimpses, reflections, and imaginings of the natural environment above, around, and underneath Charleston, the next set of checklists have to do with the human activity and traces of subjects that took physical form before the present age. Perhaps most imaginatively of all, I would look for hints and precursors to things that will come to full fruition in decades to come. As it has been attributed to the science-fiction writer of the near-future, William Gibson, “The future is already here – it’s just not evenly distributed.” [quoted in The Economist, December 4, 2003] That is, pieces of the future may be more easily visible in some locations than in others.
Charleston, like any other location, takes its shape historically, reflecting the building materials, methods, tools and aesthetics according to the aspirations and functional needs of the time. Geographic constraints determine where to build and where not to build. The flow of traffic, the livelihoods available to residents, and the climate dictate what areas develop first or last, and where the pace of the place is fastest and slowest. So by looking slowly and thoughtfully and the streetscapes, something of past lives and of future ones, too, can be visualized. Even though those old-time events, personalities, and realities of Charleston do not belong to my own self or my ancestors (or those who may descend from me), it is not difficult to suspend disbelief long enough to “borrow” those memories, as if they were one’s own property, temporarily. When imagination is tired or the limits are reached, then a visit to the city museum or local history section of the library (or genealogical collection) might supply the visual means to place one’s mind in the city at various locations in a variety of decades. Related to this visual filip to embracing other times in and around your location is the concept of jibunshi [Japanese for History and Self]. Starting in the 1980s in Japan these amateur histories took one’s family or town as protagonist and related the regional, national, and international changes, trends, inventions, and cataclysms as the storyline in which the protagonist could be foregrounded. In this same spirit, taking Charleston as the subject but also referencing the major changes of each generation or century helps to ground those larger events on the local ground, thus deepening one’s embrace of the place.
Taken together, the life in the natural environment (excluding the human part) and the cultural landscape deepen one’s relationship to the place. Physically traversing by foot or bicycle also weaves three-dimensional experience into one’s sensations of the place, too. Just knowing how to navigate from point A to point B is the sign of a resident, instead of a disoriented newcomer. In other words, knowing the nature and the society, past and present for a location like Charleston, SC helps to form the modest roots of a personal connection.
Another dimension of getting to know a place and seeing it with the eyes of an insider is to seek out some of the routine places one would visit if residing there for years or generations: a nearby elementary school, the local library, grocery store, hospital, gas station, convenience store and so on. Going to these kinds of places gives a likeness of normal, routine life as a local resident. While making this concerted effort to observe and participate in the place may seem more like work than vacation, the result should be something gained – not the release of floating free as a stranger or spectator without the usual routines and responsibilities of home, but instead the sense of embracing the place as one’s own; of knowing it, warts and all, at least a little more than when first begun.
Finally, and altogether of another order of experience of knowing a place, there are some mental frames or mindsets that can affect the way that one sees the place. One way is to adopt a disaster or trauma perspective: researching or just imagining extreme events of a place in the vast sweep of time up to the present. When events date to the period of written (or media recorded) accounts then a lot of detail is accessible, but places of atrocity rely on forensic digging to form a picture of the particulars – Pompeii, Babi Yar, for instance. Another way is to adopt a capstone perspective, building up one’s preparations to really look forward to going to the place and meeting the myriad sights and sound in person; a culmination to a long process.
A third approach is the time-traveler way, in which the site visit comes vividly alive as if one’s presence is semi-invisible, as a specter from a few generations ago who now has a week to walk the “future” and see how life has turned out. Likewise, if adopting the conceit of person from the future, then the chance to “go back in time” makes the days spent on site very intensified, too. One’s mortality or the transient quality of each passing hour feels more urgent in these conditions.
A fourth approach is the attitude of a religious pilgrim making effort to reach the greatly desired destination – either an actual site associated with a major religious tradition, or more figuratively to reach a long sought after destination (not necessarily part of organized religion past or present). In the same vein is darshan, paying one’s respects by making one’s way to the revered subject and giving homage (a deity in physical/geological majesty such as mountain top; or more figuratively and not strictly a religious practice, but merely an attitude of great longing and respect). By framing one’s visit to a new place (or an old, familiar one of one’s earlier days) as a kind of pilgrimage, the hints of awe or moments of wonder are more likely to infuse the vision. Just reaching the desired destination becomes a kind of achievement that deepens the meaning; and then to abide fully in the five senses in the presence of the place adds more layers of significance to the experience. Besides the physical sensory impressions the waking attitude of privileged audience and awe of the subject adds another flavor to the time spent dwelling in the place; a sort of “umami” that suffuses the other five senses.
A fifth mindset or mental frame comes from speaking a foreign language well enough to process the experiences in description and reflection that way. Each language shapes the person’s worldview at the same time that the worldview affects the language used to portray the place, interact with the cultural landscape and the natural environment, and articulate one’s responses to things there.
Doubtless there are many more mental frames to organize the experience of visiting a new place in one’s own country or in a foreign land and language. But as the components and checklists for purposefully drilling down and getting to know a location and its surroundings, these examples point the way to achieving some direct, personal grasp of a moment and a place. It puts one in the in-betweeny (liminal) position of not-insider, not-outsider. One can see the streetscape in slightly familiar and normalizing terms, complete with historical memories or knowledge. But also one can see the streetscape with fresh eyes and the impressionable sensitivity of an outsider. This intermediate position, perhaps, is the best one for putting thoughts into words since the total insider might take for granted much of the detail there and the total outsider might not perceive the details that comprise the character and meaning of a place.
In summary, for a person who wants to see a place (their own or a distant one) fully and deeply, these methods of the thought experiment should provide a good beginning. After that, it is up to one’s degree of motivation and the amount of energy and ambition that one brings to the task of embracing and then articulating the contours and meanings of the place, whether that takes the form of words, pictures, video and audio clips, or some combination of all these things. There do seem to be so many ways to read the natural environment and cultural landscape. Surely some of these will suit just about any traveler to distant places, or when viewing one’s own routine surroundings as an outsider might.
Photo recropped long and narrow to produce boundaries to frame the scene; but in real life, the water & sky go on and on.
Still photos can be spontaneous point-and-shoot, “grab shots,” or they can be carefully composed from the fixed position of tripod or from a steady, hand-held stance. In both cases, though, the frame lines define the edges of the canvas where meaningful relationships between foreground and the distance, and between the static & moving elements can be captured with the release of the shutter. When viewing a picture of any medium, it is worth considering the wider context (what lies just outside the cropping boundary of the frame) and what might be moving around the scene before or after the “frozen moment” when the creator’s composition holds each subject locked into position relative to the frame and in connection to the other subjects nearby. By expanding your visual imagination to include things before and after the moment of the composition, the way that daily reality and artfully composed captures are related to each other begins to become clear; that is, out of the push and pull of daily life’s small moments of splendor and wonder there are points when all the pieces come into alignment, creating a natural composition for one’s mind’s eye to admire or to record.
By the same reasoning, when considering the things that are outside of the frame of view, again, the relationship can be understood between ordinary visual experience (continuous context in 360 degrees of awareness) and extra-ordinary moments of beauty, when the elements fall into place so that foreground and background draw the eye forward and lines guide the viewer’s path for looking over the scene.
There is a third consideration when observing a careful composition or a casual snapshot. That is the point of view of subjects that are located within the frame of view. By visual habit, usually viewers look at a composition frozen in time from the outside; as spectators thrilled by the way all the pieces fit into the overall effect. But a deeper and more interesting experience comes from considering the point of view of those creatures that appear inside of the picture. It could be a flock of birds, a nest of ants, flowering landscaping or wild plantings. Whatever and whoever appears in the composition has a set of responsibilities and preoccupations that fills their attention. They have expectations and ideas to reach for. There are also limitations or obstacles that the person or other creature is facing along the way to reaching their intended goal or fulfilling their plans. This way of thinking about what may be going on in the hearts or minds of subjects inside of the composition is a kind of counter-weight to the simple, exterior visual experience of people who admire a composition, while forgetting about what ideas, opportunities, and problems face the people in the photo, for example. The reward for developing a habit of considering the point of view of the people and other creatures in the photo is that the aesthetic layer of a composition is tempered by the daily reality of those “insider” viewpoints; the gap between reality and appearances can be minimized and therefore beauty does not have to be far from daily routines and habits. The reverse is also true, daily routines no longer need to be separate from artistic moments when some elements intersect and the light is of special quality, with the lines of the nearby subjects complementing the main subjects.
So the next time you are browsing a set of images online, viewing your own gallery of best photos, or immersing yourself in a glossy coffee-table photo book, try out these 3 considerations to give wider meaning to the composition: (1) ask what lies outside the frame, (2) wonder about the photo scene before and after the time of releasing the shutter, and (3) imagine the perspective of the people and animals appearing in the picture. As with most skill-based exercises, the more you practice, the easier it becomes. And the reward will be to close the mysterious gap between ordinary life and extra-ordinary captured moments of composed meaning. This exercise at seeing things in a new way goes beyond lens and images, though. The same process seems to be at work in non-visual, non-photographic situations of one’s life. These 3 exercises will widen and deepen your connections to the things appearing in the stream of daily experience: look *outside* the frame or edges (1), consider what came before and what will likely follow the thing that is presently in front of you & preoccupying your imagination (2), and take into consideration how things look from the other person’s point of view, not just your own (3).
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