A sunset: 78%, a landscape: 76%, a little girl playing with a cat: 56%, a woman breast-feeding: 54%, a folk dance: 46%, a weaver at work: 39%, a famous monument: 27%, a first communion: 26%, a snake: 20%, a rope 16%, a metal frame: 15%, cabbages: 12%, a butcher’s stall: 9%… a car accident: 1%

— Pierre Bourdieu, “The Social Definition Of Photography” in: Photography, A Middle Brow Art

A couple of years ago at a workshop with a famous photographer, there was a short pause in our discussion. The table in front of him was filled with photographs, a few of them of he held in his, shuffling others around. In a short pause, he closes his eye, pinches and massages the space between his eyes between index and thumb of his left hand.

That moment passes quickly, images get sorted out and eventually assemble into short visual phrases, forming a story and uncovering aspects that were previously hidden among the masses of shapes, colors, shades scattered on the table.

Six muscles are used to move the eye around: Superior rectus – moves the eye upward, Inferior rectus – moves the eye downward, Lateral rectus – moves the eye outward (away from the nose); Medial rectus – moves the eye inward (toward the nose), Superior oblique – rotates the top of the eye toward the nose and moves the eye downward; Inferior oblique – rotates the top of the eye away from the nose and moves the eye upward. In addition to these, there are intraocular muscles inside the eye that control lens shape (for focusing) and pupil size: Ciliary muscle – controls lens accommodation, the Sphincter pupillae – constricts the pupil and the Dilator pupillae – dilates the pupil.

Like all muscles, it is not hard to imagine, that these are also not immune to fatigue, that they can tire out and the burden of looking at the world can start to begin to be too much. But maybe it’s also the optical nerve, this tireless electric cable, that connects the lightless matter of our brain to the world flooded with light and color, that burns out, looses its nuance and eventually replaces the ecstasy of light with a dull flicker, while we recede further and further into our own brains.

Here is the speculation about this: There is this idea of having seen too much.

The educational work multiplies the burden of looking: Not enough, that we are confronted with our own repetition, the inescapability of photographing the obvious – we’re now discovering something universal, a penchant for those things close to us, photographed in the most repeatable way, a haunting circle of   recapitulating that what is self-evident that encloses us all.

Every photographer goes through this honeymoon of copied reality: Everything is beautiful, when entangled in a frame, because this is just what the world is and it simply needs four borders and a fifth side to face you to remind us of that…

Eventually, with age, the Ciliary muscle looses its agility: It compromises our ability to control the expansion and contraction of the lens, which ultimately looses our ability to focus it: For those of us, that used glasses all their live, this mode of existence of the world in two focus planes is nothing new. The world becomes blurry and colors start to mesh – this is when we start receding into our brains, that somehow already have been saturated with images and can now start existing separated from the visual world. It is a breathing pattern, where we eventually gasp for visual air or dive deeper into our darkness. Eventually, these patterns become more and more elongated…