On returning from the gym in our building, I stepped onto the elevator, keeping my head low and offering only a cursory glance at the two people already in the elevator, a young woman wearing earbuds and staring at her iPhone, and an older woman, stout in the way one imagines peasants in the Stalinist regime were stout. I moved to press the button for my floor and found that it had already been pressed, at which point the young woman wearing earbuds and staring at her iPhone said: Hi Dad.
My daughter had just finished her last mid-term exam and was stopping in at our place on her way to Billy Bishop airport and a weekend jaunt to visit her boyfriend.
It appalls me that I would utterly fail to recognize my own daughter even though I was standing no more than a metre away from her. As a photographer, I pride myself on my keen powers of observation, especially when I’m out wandering in the streets. Seeing is supposed to be my thing. How is it, then, that I could be so bad at it?
One possible explanation—and this is just a preliminary theory—is that street photography has encouraged certain habits that inhibit my seeing. I tend to oscillate between looking closely (discerning detail) and looking generally (discerning form). The first requires far more energy and concentration and so it often exhausts my faculty of seeing. When I stepped onto the elevator, I had just completed one of my zombie apocalypse bicycle rides where I imagine I’m being pursued by a hoard of the brain-eating undead, and so I was tired. I was relaxed in my seeing, unfocussed, noticing vague forms but little else.
