The Educated Eye
“And now, my friend, I ask you to open your eyes wide. Do you keep your eyes open? Have you been trained to open your eyes? Do you continually keep them open? What do you look at when you walk?”. This advice from Le Corbusier to architecture students could be extended to anyone involved in a creative education. We create from memory, and our memory is stimulated by what we see and observe in our daily lives. كيف تفوز في روليت
Photography is not only a documentary medium, it is a source of inspiration, an autonomous and independent report that arises from the deliberate observation of the ordinary. A light, a texture, a game of scales, an atmosphere, a decontextualized object… everything serves as a catalyst of curiosity and a stimulator of creative action. Thus, we generate a process of deduction and intuition developed into a map of latent, arbitrary or recurrent images that becomes, by analogy and dialectical comparison, a true design methodology.
The sensitivity of the creative is forged through the lens of the educated eye, with or without the camera. Architects, designers, or artists yearn to look, and in doing so, they end up tuning their palate: the eye is the precise instrument for external appreciation and for self-criticism, that is, for the reflective analysis of one’s own creative activity.
The postmodern consecration of visual culture certainly ended up conferring an overvalued power to the image that silenced other sources of spatial knowledge and understanding. The “uninterrupted rain of images”, in Italo Calvino’s words, resulted in the rupture between image and reality, aggravated by the urgency of the virtual, and perverted this cognitive discernment by making us glimpse, in the first place, the epidermal appearance of things and not so much their essence and identity.
If to look is not only to describe but also to perceive and therefore to express, this oppressive empire of the visual urgently requires the critical reformulation of some operating principles that could give it credibility. Consequently, the popularization of the visual demands a pedagogical effort that seeks the approval of a coherent, rigorous and sensitive visual language.
Looking is not a harmless action. “There is no such thing as an innocent look,” Ernest Gombrich sentenced. لعبة 21 The appreciative look certainly brings about the construction, or even reconstruction, of individual and collective aesthetic principles. The gaze, and photography as an operative mechanism of visual expression, must therefore recompose its heuristic value that helps us explore non-verbal methods of knowledge in a disciplined way. Faced with a blurred and insensitive visual field due to its saturation, the consequent visual agnosia certainly requires a pedagogy that recomposes the vectors of the visual world and explains from a cultivated memory the fertile spatial associations of the physical world.
“We think in images before we think in ideas. Ideas are distilled into images. Ideas are images,” writes Spanish professor Federico Soriano. However, the image is not always the result of a conscious and intentional act of looking. If already in 1927 László Moholy-Nagy warned that the illiterate of the future would not be “the one inexperienced in writing but the one ignorant of photography,” we could reread this premonition today as an incentive to carry out any training activity in the field of photography. We are interested in rethinking the image as a result of the act of looking, and “photography,” as understood by Rosalind Krauss, as an expression of the processes that configure and decant the visual. “When the eyes see clearly, the spirit decides convincingly,” pronounced Le Corbusier. Therefore, we must pedagogically facilitate this clairvoyance, but supported by a refined, critical, and educated counterpoint.
All these premises are somehow present in the “Contrast” project, which in this second edition includes the photographic work done in different pedagogical contexts linked to art, design, and architecture. This collective commitment to endow the photographic narrative with identity and autonomy underlines the importance of continuing to build a formative corpus, a valid roadmap for the construction of this educated gaze that allows us to explore and interpret the challenges of our contemporaneity. بينجو لعبة
1 LE CORBUSIER (2001). Mensaje a los estudiantes de arquitectura. Buenos Aires: Ediciones Infinito, p. 68.
2 SORIANO, F. (2009). 100 Hipermínimos. Valencia: Lampreave, p. 97.