Robert Hesse
Experience as a scientist and educator long ago convinced me that much of what we experience cannot be expressed in words or by numbers. For the most important discussion we must turn to art. I've been taking photographs for sixty years. The camera captures light with remarkable fidelity. We are bombarded with photographs and mistakenly consider them representations of what we see. Our vision is not à photographic record of light falling onto our eyes; it is, instead, constructed in our brains. We see with our brains. We see what we've seen before, what we expect to see. These unappreciated phenomena underlie a concept I was introduced to by a mentor, muse, and sometime collaborator. It was expressed in the title of a book by Lawrence Weschler: "Seeing is forgetting the name of what we're looking at." I try to capture what we don't see. I attempt to creat images that escape the name of what I'm looking at. I delight in the camera's ability to, merge, flatten, isolate, confuse. I find what the camera omits more important than what it captures. You may see few people in my images, but there are always two: me, the photographer, and you the viewer. That which passes between us Is the measure of "art".
Experience as a scientist and educator long ago convinced me that much of what we experience cannot be expressed in words or by numbers. For the most important discussion we must turn to art. I've been taking photographs for sixty years. The camera captures light with remarkable fidelity. We are bombarded with photographs and mistakenly consider them representations of what we see. Our vision is not à photographic record of light falling onto our eyes; it is, instead, constructed in our brains. We see with our brains. We see what we've seen before, what we expect to see. These unappreciated phenomena underlie a concept I was introduced to by a mentor, muse, and sometime collaborator. It was expressed in the title of a book by Lawrence Weschler: "Seeing is forgetting the name of what we're looking at." I try to capture what we don't see. I attempt to creat images that escape the name of what I'm looking at. I delight in the camera's ability to, merge, flatten, isolate, confuse. I find what the camera omits more important than what it captures. You may see few people in my images, but there are always two: me, the photographer, and you the viewer. That which passes between us Is the measure of "art".
