Seeing and Writing Chapter One

The first chapter of the book Seeing and Writing 3 was very appropriately focused on opening up its readers minds and eyes. It isn't easy to read closely or to look deeper. Sometimes the easiest route is to perceive everything with what the book calls “passive looking.”
Like Anne Dillard said in her essay Seeing “What you see is what you get,” we all can only derive meanings from art that we are willing to see. When I first saw the first photo of Pinkhassov's portfolio I “passively” glanced at it without really deriving much out of it in the way of meaning. Upon turning the pages and realizing there was much more to the portfolio I was able to return to the photo of the praying athletes with a keener eye. After returning to analyze the photo for a third and fourth time I saw much more than I had initially allowed myself to see. How often does this “passive looking” not only hide a work's meaning for me, but change its meaning all together?
When I glanced at the Volkswagen “Driver's Wanted” ad, it took me a little while to work my way over to the car in the bottom right corner. I had been trying to overcome the “passive looking” effect and was trying to slowly analyze every individual picture in the grid. I was already forming my own meaning out of it. I imagined that the photos were criticizing the boring, flat, unnatural lines of industry. Like the photos were attacking our modern culture's need for symmetry and how this is shown in our everyday lives. Imagine my disappointment when I realized the photo's true purpose was to encourage me to buy a New Beetle simply because of its unique shape. The context of the work changed my entire experience.
To quote Anne Dillard again, “Its all a matter of keeping my eyes open.”