Pommes et oranges, Paul Cézanne, c. 1899

I recently picked up the book Proust Was a Neuroscientist, written by Jonah Lehrer, and I am enjoying it quite a bit. On a basic level, the book is about the intersection of art and science, which happen to be two of my favorite subjects. Specifically, Lehrer makes the case that artists over the years have predicted certain things about the nature of human perception that have later proven to be startlingly accurate.

I came across one paragraph in particular yesterday about Cézanne that hit me like a bolt of lightning. It’s a perfect summary of what I was trying to get across in my comments to Simen last week. As usual, my skills as a writer failed me, and I appreciate that someone has already done a much better job of explaining this than I have.

To recap, I was trying to describe the process that I have experienced while making my own photographs wherein I am able to separate the formal qualities of the image from recognition of the subject. I used the phrase “taking photographs of what is actually there,” which I think just confused things. The best analogy I can think of is the Magic Eye posters that were popular years ago; you look at them in a very specific way, let your focus drift, and a secret 3-D image appears.

My mental process while taking pictures is a little bit like this. After I’ve found a site that I like for a photograph and get the logistics of the camera out of the way, I spend a few minutes trying to absorb everything I can about the scene. I sometimes try to frame out the image with my hands in an approximation of the eventual photograph. If my mind is cooperating that day, at some point I am able to become completely immersed in the scene, to the point where nothing else exists. I become highly tuned to the forms within the picture while simultaneously losing any sense of recognition of the scene. This is the moment when I figure out whether or not the picture is going to work and if so, exactly what it should be. If I am successful, the end result is an interesting picture, rather than a picture of an interesting subject. The distinction is hugely important to me and I think it has become the main motivation behind my work.

Sometimes this mental state is easy to find, and sometimes it’s impossible. One of my odd-ball side projects lately has been to try to identify the nature of this state and figure out how to get there more often.

To return to Jonah Lehrer and this paragraph about Cézanne:

Cézanne often spent hours contemplating a brushstroke. Out in the open air, he would stare at his subject until it melted under his gaze, until the forms of the world had decayed into a formless mess. By making his vision disintegrate, Cézanne was trying to return to the start of sight, to become nothing but “a sensitive recording plate.” The slowness of this method forced Cézanne to focus on simple things, like a few red apples set on a trapezoid of a table, or a single mountain seen from afar. But he knew that the subject itself was irrelevant. Stare hard enough, his paintings implore, and the laws of the known universe will emerge from just about anything. “With an apple,” Cézanne once said, “I will astonish Paris.”

Lehrer might be a overreaching a bit here when he says that the subject itself is irrelevant, but the point is taken. With the right kind of attention, even the most humble subjects can offer extraordinary insight.