Slow Seeing

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subject rolled by. No car chases, no emotional dramas, no uplifting moral, no narrative, except to the extent that travel itself, space itself, is narrative. It was as though they inhabited a world in which nothing was enough, as long as it was beautiful.

Of course the perception that nothing is happening usually means that the observer is moving faster than the observed; something is always happening, even if it's on the timescale of light changing, trees growing, rocks eroding. Only in paintings and photographs is there real stillness, but up in Yosemite we have been pursuing the changes between one photograph and another, the exacting art of rephotography. Mark and Byron are rephoto-graphing some of the definitive photo-graphs of the place, an astounding technique for understanding what Carleton Watkins, Eadweard Muybridge, Ansel Adams, and Edward Weston were up to, and how the ecology has changed in the time between their pictures and ours, down to the trajectories of individual trees.

I say 'we' because I work on scouting locations and logistics and because the meaning of the project comes out of our conversation; but once the tripod is up, I am idle. That is, I am doing nothing. And the form that nothing takes is looking. Or perhaps we need distinct words for looking and seeing, just as we do for wistful envy, whereby I wish I had what you do, and seething jealousy, whereby I wish you didn't have it.

Looking might be the business of glancing at things long enough to take them in as information; seeing, the art of soaking them up, of letting them sink in, of feeling them. For what I found during our slow photographic sessions is that afterward each place had imprinted on me -- it wasn't that I could recall the place with some sort of photographic accuracy, but that it had become part of me, that when I thought of it there was a definite feeling, not an image of place but a sense of place. Imprinted: One could think of the mind as akin to photographic paper. It takes time. It takes a long exposure, generally, for something to make an impression, which suggests that we who are so busy go around blank, unimpressed. Painters, photographers, fishers, and birdwatchers, among others, seem to have developed their pursuits in part as sidelong strategies to do nothing, to be in a place long enough to see it.

I've been equally interested in how long it takes to see a work of visual art, since few artists outside advertising make their art for someone to pass by at a slow saunter, the pace that museums seem to dictate (and the more popular the show, the more necessary it is to keep pace with the rest). Last spring, teaching a group of writing students at the visually spectacular, acoustically challenged San Francisco campus of the California College of the Arts, I took them far and wide in search of a quiet place, and toward the end of the semester we ended up in the school's gallery, where artist Roni Horn's close-ups of the Thames River were showing.

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