Seeing always has a spiritual dimension. The regard wants to understand and, in this way, produces the meaning and significance that permeates everything that is sensual-phenomenal. Stephen Shore writes in his book The Nature of Photographs, p. 132: “When I make a photograph, my perceptions feed into my mental model. My model adjusts to accommodate my perceptions (leading me to change my photographic decisions). This modelling adjustment alters, in turn, my perceptions. And so on. It is a dynamic, self-modifying process. It is what an engineer would call a feedback loop. / It is a complex, ongoing, spontaneous interaction of observation, understanding, imagination, and intention.”
It can be simplified by saying: I always have a picture in my head (a “model”), which only partially matches what can actually be seen. ‘Model’ and ‘reality’ are in a constantly shifting creative tension; the dynamic field between these two poles is where photography is located.
I myself experience this process as follows:
I ‘see’ something, I’m affected. I suspect something. My “mental model”, that is what I would like to see as an image, is thus actually only on its way. I look closer and modify my regard. Is something shown (as a model, as the ‘thing’) that this situation is about or could be about here and now? The photo is created, but it must always be subsequently checked against a model. Has such a model framed itself? Even the absence of a mental model can be a model, an ‘idea’ ... something that can finally only be seen in the photo itself.