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“To see or not to see” is the fourth story of the book “An anthropologist on Mars”. The story tells of a man affected from childhood by pigmented retinitis, therefore destined to become progressively blinder, who undergoes an operation to recover his sight. After the operation he discovers that being physically able to see does not in itself imply seeing because each one of us learns to see during our lifetime just as one learns to talk, to read and to write. His sight is therefore ineffective and confusing; put in front of an object he still has to touch it; only then does the information suggested by his sight become reliable enough for him to attempt to recognise it. Put in front of a still image (an artwork, a photograph) he cannot manage tell one individual from another or see the differences between parts of a landscape. He can only identify abstract images devoid of cultural co-ordinates. An image of a man is not a man. An image of a tree is not a tree. To a person devoid of visual education images are nothing more than indistinct shadows, without significance or connection to what they claim to represent. Reality, solidity is what is missing. Foremost it is language that allows an icon to be translated into its referent. The patient could not recognise reality or its transpositions simply because he could not bring any prior knowledge of it to mind. I took his photography on board a moving public transport boat with a standing camera. I thought about the feelings of bewilderment experienced when a train suddenly enters a tunnel and everything suddenly disappears altering sensorial co-ordinates to the point that instinctively you grab hold of the arm rest and just as suddenly light returns, you have a different perception of your surroundings though you have been quietly watching them for hours. It is this idea of “falling” into darkness and surfacing again with less certainty, as if everything had to be rediscovered, that struck me in the boat. It was sunset and the rays of light came and went in intermittent flash. The person in front of me became a shadow the nature of which I could not be sure of, everything suddenly becomes pure form and the only thing that maintained its reliable identity was the handle of the sliding door, the only definite thing to cling to in a tactile emergency like arm rest on a train in the shock of sudden darkness. |