ANOTHER WAY OF LOOKING

This was part of a series I began in 1977 while at Art College. It caused a hell of a storm with the photographic traditionalists. The approach originated in a period of revolution in the cultural and artistic world of late 70s England. The stimulus was a question - "why should we only use the in-focus end of a lens? The Philosophy was Gestalt. That a pattern can be predicted so not all of it needs to be seen. The human brain can anticipate what is missing and construct the whole from a limited amount of data. Take an example in music. It is possible to know where a tune played in 12 bar blues is going without actually knowing it through familiarity with the sequence. Similarly, the lack of information in the picture but the knowlege that it is a photograph steers the viewer to know the subject must have existed in the 'real world' and therefore try to work out what they are looking at.