We take pictures with unconsciousness
i take pics with unconsciousness
Lately, I’ve been reorganizing and reviewing my photos, and I have realized something. All the flower photos I’ve taken so far are of flowers whose names I know. I’ve only photographed very common flowers, like tulips, roses, cosmos, spider lilies, mimosa, hydrangeas, and cherry blossoms—flowers that clearly show the seasons. When I take a walk outside or travel, I thought I was taking photos based on my own feelings and instincts. But when I think about it, I’ve come to a vague but personal conclusion. The flowers I photograph are only those whose names I know or have seen before. In other words, if I don’t know the name of a flower, even if it’s beautifully blooming by the roadside, I won’t notice it, and I won’t point my camera at it.
Recently, one of the things I’ve seen and heard that impressed me was Course in General Linguistics by the Swiss linguist Ferdinand de Saussure. I didn’t read the original book, nor have I studied linguistics, but I devoured numerous YouTube videos and summary websites, and found the way of thinking very interesting. Saussure argued that the world does not have pre-existing entities to which names are attached. Instead, he claimed that names are given to things in order to create a relationship of opposition with other things. Therefore, depending on the language you use, the way you name and perceive the world is different. A good example of this is the distinction between “moths” and “butterflies” in English and Japanese, which are separate terms, but in French, they are both called “Papillon,” without distinguishing them. To put it bluntly, it’s not that things exist and then names are given to them; rather, it’s because names are given that those, things come into existence. When I first learned about this way of thinking, I was deeply impressed.
Looking at my photo library again with this way of thinking, I feel like I can somewhat understand why I’ve only photographed flowers whose names I know, and why there are almost no flowers I don’t know the name of them. I used to think that when I had my camera and was eager to take pictures, I was freely pressing the shutter as I liked, but it turned out it wasn’t the case at all. When I came across a flower on the street or during my travels, if it was a flower I knew, in my mind, it was like “Ah! That flower! I know it! It’s beautiful!” and I would point my camera at it. To put it more precisely, even though there are many kinds of flowers blooming during the season, when I used my limited vocabulary to divide up the world, the flowers I didn’t know were processed as “noise,” and I only showed interest in the ones I recognized. What I didn’t know equated to what I thought of as “unnamed things.” According to Saussure, if the language is different, the way we divide and perceive the world is different. When I apply this idea to my own situation, the world I perceive has completely different levels of resolution, depending on how many words they know. The flowers I thought were beautiful when I pressed the shutter they might have been captured in a world of lower resolution through me. I might have unconsciously been limiting myself to what I could recognize.
