ku # 543 ~ through the eyes of a child
Thursday, December 18, 2008 at 09:11AM 
Ice patterns and erractic • click to embiggen
Mom, dad, and grampa • click to embiggenMy recent ruminations regarding "pure" pictures may have had an instigating circumstance that I really hadn't thought about until I viewed the 2 pictures presented here (on the left).
These pictures were 2 amongst many made by Hugo (he's 4 years old) on the day before I encountered the previously mentioned become as little child bit. He made these pictures at a restaurant while we were waiting for our dinners (after our family visit to Santa's Workshop). His modus operandi was simple - he just roamed around the restaurant dining room and the adjoining barroom and snapped merrily away making pictures of whatever caught his interest. After each and every "snap", he beat feet back to our table to show us what he had pictured and once the chimping was complete, off he dashed to look and picture some more.
What struck me at the time was how fun he was having to be making pictures and how excited he was to share them with us. What I also found interesting was what he found interesting enough to make pictures of. With the benefit of hindsight it has become obvious to me that Hugo, by means of his picturing and pictures, was giving us a glimpse into his "hidden" personage in a manner that he is not now capable of doing with words.
I have known for quite a while that Hugo has a very active "life" inside his head - the kid's brain is constantly working, working, working. He internalizes so much of what he sees and experiences and he has expressed what seems to me to be a very heightened curiosity and desire to understand it all. I must admit that, at times, that characteristic in him scares the hell out of me.
Nevertheless, that is the reason that I gave him a nice camera for Xmas a year ago. I had a sense that Hugo, if dad consistently fostered the idea of putting a camera in his hand, would just naturally start showing us what he was interested in / curious about. And those pictures, in turn, could tell us much more than words ever could (at this stage of his life) about the person Hugo is and is becoming.
While it can literally be said that Hugo is seeing things through the eyes of a child, I absolutely believe that his picturing responses to things visual is directed by things internal that are very much a part of his unthought known. Even at his young and tender age, he is making choices about what to picture and I can not image what is dictating these choices other his "pure" connection to what he finds interesting.
And here's the thing, I find his pictures very interesting and engaging - not so much the 2 presented here, but some of the other ones of just plain "stuff". I am acutely aware of his desire to show us what he finds interesting - an activity that he can not possibly consciously understand as an attempt to tell us something about who and what he is. In that sense, his pictures are quite "pure".
And, if there's a picture-making lesson in all of this (and I believe there is), it's that, if we care to listen to and try to understand what he (and, by extension, many other picture makers) is telling us, the world just might be a better place.
BTW, the other lesson one could come away with it's that the rules of composition don't mean s**t when it comes to making an engaging and interesting picture.
Reader Comments (2)
I just recently saw this when my son gave my granddaughter his first digital camera that he purchased when he was in Iraq. She is 9 and to see the images she makes is truly seeing "through the eyes of a child".
I'm sort of (but not really) embarrassed to say this but my modus operandi with my photography is pretty much just like Hugo's. I virtually never plan anything that I photograph. I just take my camera with me when I feel like it, and snap merrily away if I see things that look interesting to me while I'm there, wherever that may be. This may be a pretty loosey-goosey approach but I think it's the only way I can really enjoy photography. In that sense, the minimization of expectation, the minimization of gear, the minimization of analyzing, is what keeps my photography feeling somewhat pure I guess. I think this method produces plenty of crappy shots to be sure, but also lots of little gems of purity about what it was that I saw and felt.