The difference between your photograph and what you actually saw

 

It's a beautiful morning and I'm travelling on an early train soon after dawn, passing through the beautiful October countryside of Suffolk. The low yellow light tells you exactly what season it is. The colours on the trees do the same thing. The conversation of the college students in the seats in front provide a counterpoint to the visual rhythmns outside.

I was very tempted to take a photo to show you what I could see. This is an instinct that is very strong in nearly everyone who owns a smartphone. But I have resisted and given you a picture of a kitten instead. 

I have been thinking a lot about the relationship between what we see and what we immortalise in our photos. They are two quite different things, for several reasons. 

Not least is the fact that what our eyes see is not the same as that photo, even if we believe, quite reasonably that it must be. Only a small portion of our field of vision is in focus, or even in colour! The photo blandly ignores this and stays all focused and coloured right to the edge of the frame. But even more importantly, a huge amount of what we see is actually made up by the predictive elements of our brains. It sounds ridiculous but is is true and testable (I can send you tests if you'd like to try one). Most of what we see is actually composed of what we *expect* to see in a particular scene, and we only really focus on things that clash with our predictions. 

It sounds weird, but makes good computational sense, brain-wise. But it also pushes that photo further from the experience itself.

Consider also the fact that our experience of the world is not mono-sensual. Our camera can only see, but while our eyes are looking, we can at the same time smell and hear and feel, and remember and be subject to feelings and passions. If you saw a scene accompanied by someone you love, was it the same as the scene you saw alone?

And the multi-sensory nature of our interaction with the world means that when we see the photo we cannot but infill the other senses that we felt. If I see a photo of a meal I ate, its as if I can taste it again. 

Which means that the photo from this train window which I didn't put at the top of the post would mean less to you than it does to me. And your own photos are richer to you for all the other memories they bring up. 

Maybe that is essentially the function of our thousands of snaps. They are, like a poem, a recollection of emotion considered in tranquility. They are a small key back into the richness of our experience of this beautiful world. They are not reality, but they unlock the door to it.

And, in the absence of that memory to unlock, the kitten was very cute, wasn't it?