Impressed, But Not Moved
By: The Art Of Photography
Tags: Content, Creativity, Social Media, Instagram, Photography

I would encourage you to view this article on a large monitor and stretch the browser all the way to the full length of it, allowing this image above to reach its maximum width. At this size, more things will become apparent to you — the submerged left foot of the older sister, the ankle bracelet on the younger and her watery toes, the dress wrinkles and skin dimples and stray hairs. These are just some fun details. There’s a lot more to take in as we explore the true effects of imagery on our brains.

What you want in a photograph, more than anything, is for the image to resonate with your expectations. Even if you don’t know you want it, your brain’s hope is that the image it’s seeing does not surprise you, or differ from your understanding of the scenario. Science has shown that our memory and ability to predict an outcome has helped us survive two hundred thousand years of evolution and our heady discussions of what makes an image good or bad are powerless against our ingrained predilections. The quick, bio-logical conclusion for viewers of photographs is that our eyes scan the image, looking for the truth of what we believe we’re looking at. The more that’s given to us the more satisfying the experience. The less that’s given to us, the more our brains have to work to fill it in. Which does not mean we cannot be moved by darkness, but that the general feeling of it is not one of safety or comfort. And perhaps some of us like being thrown off kilter a bit — this is not a discussion on art so much as the groundwork for a case that, from our nature, we interpret imagery in two different ways: as some form of innate satisfaction (an image that is evocative or illustrative of things I already know, have seen or believe to be true) or as a trigger for intellectual interpretation, built from a method of self-preservation.

In 2010, scientists ran a study using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to show how “visually non-stimulated regions in primary visual cortex and visual area are influenced by the surrounding context.” The studies show that we are filling in areas we can’t see with information from what we can see. This kind of research has led to new thoughts on how we view and interpret the world, visually. A neuroscientist at the University College London described it like this: “…the brain actively predicts what input it will receive, rather than just passively processing information as it arrives.”

In an abstract from a similar study, the results were described as: “When faced with a crowded visual scene, observers must selectively attend to behaviorally relevant objects to avoid sensory overload. Often this selection process is guided by prior knowledge of a target-defining feature (e.g., the color red when looking for an apple), which enhances the firing rate of visual neurons that are selective for the attended feature.”

All together, studies like these support a premise that our memories and experiences come with us when viewing a photograph. And while that’s relatively intuitive in theory, it offers a platform from which to discuss social media imagery differently than the current cultural narrative of it. We tend to focus on the overall affect, or emotional gestalt, of seeing people doing things we aren’t doing and looking better and happier than they really are (FOMO), when there’s an entirely other set of cognitive things happening with us simply based on the size and quality of the images themselves and our biological predisposition for interpretation of imagery.

Let’s start with the positive side of an image with a lot of detail, like the one above: Sisters Washing Feet. It’s a random image, but still carefully chosen for reasons I’ll get into. It could very well have been an airplane taking off from a runway or a still life of fruits — the important thing for the image is that there are many human things to relate to, or to bring to it from your own experiences. The image is, aside from being a compilation of colored pixels or continuously displayed tones, also a moment captured in time and place of people. It would be impossible not to come to it with a certain amount of expectation and understanding garnered from your own experiences with various elements of it; the relationship of siblings, the experiences of youth, of the beach, of sunsets, sand, pools of water, wood planks, the end of the day and many other things that are present in this photo. So, in all, this image has a lot of “recall potential,” and therefore works well for the purposes of the discussion.

The other thing this image has is detail. It’s a RAW file (or at least it was until I converted it to a JPG, for purposes of posting it in the article), with no post work done to it. This is what we call SOOC (straight out of the camera). It comes from one of the best cameras on the market — the Nikon D850, which features a backlit, high-megapixel count sensor that offers incredibly true color and detail, especially in shadows — an area that has traditionally been very difficult for both film and digital cameras alike, without the assistance of lighting equipment. This is why you’re able to view this image larger and see the incredible detail in there. And I prefer natural light for this discussion over artificial light, as it is more like real life.

An image like this, according to our contemporary understanding of how we see, should have a high satisfaction rate for most people because of a couple of things it has going for it. It offers a few romantic elements from which your own memories and experiences can draw expectations from: relationships between people, siblings, beaches, sunsets, childhood, etc. Sometimes we call this “story,” though I prefer to look at an image as a moment. Still, the context of our minds does bring a certain story to it — our own. And some of that is fairly predictable. Humans share certain emotions for certain things in common ways: babies, kittens, sunsets, good looking food — all basic elements of our human experience with high quotients of positive experiences attached to them. It’s little wonder we love to see them.

In this image from the same night, taken only moments after the earlier one, we see something we can all relate to — a sunset. It happens to have been one of the more incredible sunsets I’ve ever witnessed, and perhaps that comes across here because you already had a preconceived notion of what a sunset is, but the added details of rays of light and incredible gradations of gold to blue offered an even more enhanced image of that. It was your memory, plus. Or, at the very least, it approaches looking like great sunsets you’ve also seen, and had positive feelings about.