David Beatty Photography

THE NAKED EYE

This gallery is a selection of ‘experiments in seeing’ or photography as a form of contemplation. These pictures are less about the object of the photograph as a recognizable person, place or event, familiar, exotic or extraordinary, and more about rediscovering the ordinary.

Marcel Proust the author suggested that discovery was not always about travelling to new landscapes, but learning to see with fresh eyes. He called this approach ‘intermittence’, the feeling that you are fully present in the moment, and he characterized it as submission to ‘the great turning wheel of experience’. To see in this way is to be able to shift from our habitual patterns of reaction, categorizing the familiar, to being able to respond to the unrepeatable and unique configuration of each moment, a practice that is familiar to those who practice a meditation discipline.

‘To take photographs’, the renowned photographer Cartier-Bresson wrote, ‘is to hold one’s breath when all faculties converge in the face of fleeting reality…it is putting one’s head, one’s eyes and one’s heart on the same axis…it is a way of life.’

In short it is about paying attention with the kind of vigilance that allows the world to throw up before you the unexpected, in the play of light, texture, shade and colour, and noticing where your focus comes to rest, so that you enter an exploration of that liminal space between ‘subject’ (photographer) and ‘object’ (the photograph), where what emerges is no longer recognizable as a ‘thing’ but becomes a process in the art of seeing.