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Be Thou My Vision
March 10th, 2009
One of my favourite Van Morrison songs is his cover of the Irish hymn, Be Thou My Vision. I love it as a hymn, as a meditation, as a reminder – whatever your faith – that vision ought to be bigger than us. Vision, despite what my over-use of the word might imply, is no magic thing. It’s not something that most of us can put a finger on, and it sure as heck isn’t something you can just pull out of your back pocket, screw to the front of your lens and shoot through to take the lousy out of your image.
Vision is bigger than that. It’s everything you think and feel and bring to your photograph. It’s your worldview, your experiences, your likes, dislikes, and your passion for those weird macrame owls, all rolled into one. You do not bring or not bring your vision to a scene – it brings you. It is you. That’s what gives your images the potential to be one of a kind, unique expressions of how you see the world. Vision is what you see and how you see it. And there’s but one of you on this planet. Nikon or Canon? Seriously? Who gives a damn? If you’re a photographer – and by that I mean you HAVE to shoot – if you don’t shoot, like the psalmist your bones would turn to wax and melt – then you could use an iPhone camera, or an old 110 point and shoot. Your vision is the asset that people should most be curious about, not your preferred focal length.
Whether we recognize that vision, whether our craft is equal to the task of expressing that vision, now those are the real questions. That’s why I am so hung up on the question Why. I don’t care which camera you use, I care why you use it, what you have to say to me. When I’m at home I don’t look at other images of India or places I’ve just been. I look at work that shows me something I don’t usually see, images that say “Did you see this?” and to which I can reply honestly, “I never have.” Show me more. Like this one. Or this one. Or this one. If I want to hear the same stories I myself tell visually, I can look at my own images. These open my eyes a little wider to the world I don’t already see. They engage me. Not once did it cross my mind to ask How they took them. If I’m distracted by the technique or the medium, the story’s not doing its job. I should be distracted by the photographs, not from them, in the same way that the writer of the hymn is essentially saying to God – distract me from all these distractions.
Vision is everything. Most damning of a photograph would be, not that someone doesn’t like it, but that they’re indifferent to it. A cliche. Something shot over and over and over again in the same way that others have shot it. Nothing new. Nothing unique. Nothing worth the exclamation mark at the end of, “Hey look at this!”
You have vision, sure as you have an opinion. Maybe we should move to another metaphor, another series of words. Afterall, using the term vision as metaphor for visual perception is not terribly clever. Perhaps we should go straight to it and call it what it is – opinion, thought, viewpoint (oops, another visual reference.) Ok, hang it all, I’m going back to the obvious stuff, heck I’m just going to restate it in different words. Don’t show me what you see. Show me how you see it.
Very nice, David. Thanks. Thanks too for the links to Burn…
I think David needs either a new eye wear prescription or needs to stop drinking so much. His “vision” seems to be blurred
Getting deeper and deeper by the day David. Make sure to leave yourself a rope somewhere so you can climb back out later! This talk of deep and buried vision within us reminded me of a TED talk that I’ve seen…check it out if you’ve not already done so:
http://www.ted.com/talks/elizabeth_gilbert_on_genius.html
For some reason I got a weird negative feeling from this post. It almost makes me want to hide in shame wondering if my vision is good enough or if it amounts to the whole lot of “nothings” you talked about. This is not a criticism of your words but they sure made me look inward and question myself a little.
Thanks for taking me there but can I request a little bit of sunshine tomorrow?
Sincerely,
Rosane Walker
Sunshine Girl
P.S. Ok, I know this is not the type of signature you meant on a previous post. I did it on purpose and not because I misunderstood the assignment.
Hey david,
I think you should leave the rope behind (sorry troy), this is cliff diving, not bumgee jumping… These are the blogs i regularly return for, because you talk about how you see it, not what you see.
cheers.
cheers indeed. this is why I love your blog so much dd.
There must be something in the water because it seems all of us are reevaluating our photography, pushing our boundaries and adjusting our vision. But vision is as odd thing, it comes and goes in unpredictable ways. There are days when I am full of it, and it seems that wherever I point my camera something “right” appears. And then there are days when no matter how many times I push the shutter button nothing comes out but crap. The crap seems to appear most often when I feel in a rut artistically, shooting the same old stuff. Your past few posts have rung very true for me, because it’s an effort to think and shoot in new and different ways. Thanks.
-Dave Shaw
Blog: http://wildimagephoto.blogspot.com
I’ve also found that coffee helps a lot.
“What”, “How”…. It is all so subjective. The vision and the experience of the photographer is never going to be the same as the viewer. All I can do as an artist is to do the work that excites me and hope that others can relate to it. I am constantly despairing over my “vision”, I wish that I was a genius innovator, etc. but in the end this is what it is, my vision.
Thanks for your inspiring blog.
Larry Larsen: http://www.larsen-images.com
Great read. You’ve nailed it. I didn’t feel it was too dark, but rather unconventional. I love the thought of scrapping the word “Vision” it never seemed to capture it for me. If fact the struggle to understand the word actually has become a distraction for me. Maybe “Point of view” says it closer, but not sure what to replace it with. But, you have convinced me that, that word, that has become almost sacred to some of us needs to be revisited and probably replaced. Well said.
“Not once did it cross my mind to ask How they took them. If I’m distracted by the technique or the medium, the story’s not doing its job. I should be distracted by the photographs, not from them, in the same way that the writer of the hymn is essentially saying to God – distract me from all these distractions.”
I love that! I’m going to write it down so I can remember it and refer back to it and quote it. _)
Hello!
Very Interesting post! Thank you for such interesting resource!
PS: Sorry for my bad english, I’v just started to learn this language
See you!
Your, Raiul Baztepo