On March 14, 2020 I planned a brief and informal visual communication design exercise: while driving in Edmonton's south side I asked my 11 year old son to document the city (using a camera) from the back seat of the car. I encouraged him to capture street scenes he found interesting, and I occasionally drew his attention to sights I noticed from the front seat. The exercise was collaborative and spontaneous. The intention behind this rapid photo-journey was to explore the extent to which informal photography may communicate the current lockdown in the city of Edmonton.
After the drive I briefly inspected the pictures. As I perused each street scene I realized that I could not easily identify features that were reflective of a city in lockdown. With some exceptions, most of the pictures looked like they were captured on a quiet and ordinary Sunday evening in the spring (showing reduced traffic, empty parking lots, and random patches of snow).
I shelved and disregarded the pictures for several days. I remained undecided as to whether anything had been accomplished through the photo-journey.
A careful second inspection of the photos a week later, however (as the pandemic crisis deepened), revealed a new layer of meaning. I recognized (during this second viewing) that the street scenes, though mundane, did evoke the current reality of lockdown—their evocative power, however, was only apparent from the perspective of global events. In other words, by situating these images within the unfolding history of the coronavirus pandemic they took on new meaning.
As I reflected on this curious shift in perception I remembered a quote from John Berger's 1972 book, Ways of Seeing. The quote is the following: "The way we see things is affected by what we know or what we believe."
I found this sentence relevant to the photo exercise because it relates to how knowledge shapes perception. Although the city (as represented in pictures) looked familiar after the March 14 photo-shoot, my perception of the city—the following week after the virus spread—changed in a significant way. My point of view was altered in a matter of days, as socio-cultural circumstances evolved.
Shifts in perception is something Berger explores in the opening pages of his book. The author describes how the invention of vanishing point perspective during the Renaissance helped establish an ocularcentric worldview—elevating the sensory modality of vision in art and culture. A visual convention, as manifested in drawing, encouraged a new way of seeing in the fifteenth century.
The global pandemic of the twenty-first century has also led to a new way of seeing. The coronavirus has prompted heightened sensitivity to, among other things, our perception of urban environments—specifically, the spaces between people. Empty space has taken on new significance in recent weeks.
Distance between people has become a delicate field of negotiation. Buying groceries may now take the form of a subtle dance between strangers—one takes the initiative to avoid proximity, the other remains motionless, while the amorphous space between people shrinks and expands.
On the other hand, vast stretches of empty urban space—like parks, soccer fields, and undeveloped land—have become a type of refuge. Visiting such places I am reminded of Edward Casey's description of how "place is sensed." This evening, for instance, I stood in the middle of such a field—after looking at the sky for several minutes, I roamed the terrain before the sun went down. I stopped when I found the right "place"—out of the evening shadows, where I could feel the warm fleeting sunlight.
Admittedly, it had been years since I deliberately watched the sun go down. The experience was strangely familiar. It was a new (and old) way of seeing.
