Philosopher’s Comment

In typical cases, we’re well acquainted with the subjective quality of our visual experiences. As I write this, for instance, I have a firm grasp on the pinkness of the lilies on my table, the brightness of the cloud-filtered light coming through my window, the shape of my hands resting on the keyboard. In reflecting on what I see, I’m perfectly aware that my experience contains each of these elements, and I know just what each one is like.

But some of the most interesting episodes of visual awareness aren’t like this. There are times when our visual experiences are, for one reason or another, not fully reflectively graspable in the moments they’re occurring.

For instance, a stimulus might be too intense to focus on for more than an instant, like a violently bright screen coming on in a dark room. Or it might shift, break up or mutate before we can attend to it properly, like a mesh of shadows playing across the windshield on a nighttime drive. Or, instead, there may be something going on in peripheral vision that doesn’t quite punch through to full consciousness, like the vague shapes of people passing on the sidewalk while we’re reading on the balcony. In these cases, I take it, we don’t and can’t achieve full awareness of the quality of our visual experiences while we’re having them.

I’ve often felt a desire to take a picture of my visual field in those instants—to try to preserve the semi-conscious, obscure, fleeting details of a scene that would be gone before I could really see it. This untitled image from Matthieu Gafsou’s Vivants series seems to me to take on the challenge. I read it as, among other things, a record of a perceptual moment that a viewer couldn’t have properly absorbed at the time.

Most obviously, there’s the blinding ring of sunlight reflected on the water just a few meters off—too bright to stare at if you’re there, but reduced to a manageable intensity by my computer screen. Squinting against the wind and glare, your field of view would be narrower than the generous angle of Gafsou’s lens.

The image also reflects the roughness of vision under suboptimal conditions. Neither the beach in the foreground nor the city lights in the distance are especially sharp. Indeed, it’s hard to tell which part of the image is in focus; the details throughout have a mushy, noisy quality that evokes the vagaries of eyesight rather than the pristineness of landscape photography. A more technically impeccable image would’ve looked less like being there.

There’s a natural connection here with recent discussions in philosophy about “privileged access” and the “luminosity” of our mental states. According to a traditional view, whenever we’re in a given mental state, we’re always in a position to know that we’re in that state; the details of our conscious lives are necessarily transparent to us. Following on the heels of influential work by Timothy Williamson, philosophers in the last couple decades have debated whether all, most or even any mental states are indeed “luminous” in this sense.

Thinking about photographs like Gafsou’s can help us see a potential problem with luminosity claims. Plausibly, my real-time visual experience of a scene like Gafsou’s beach contains many elements about which I’m in no position to gain reflective knowledge: there’s something it looks like to glimpse a blinding patch of sun moving irregularly across shallow water while squinting, but the scene is too complex, fleeting and sensorily overwhelming for me to fully grasp (and hence come to know about) the quality of my experience. In the photograph, though, I can see it all; the image represents, in a sense, what I could have come to know if my visual states were genuinely luminous.

Of course, putting things this way is a little careless. What’s recorded by the camera and displayed on my screen isn’t literally what Gafsou saw, or what I would have seen; a lens and sensor isn’t an eye and an image processor isn’t a brain. Appropriate caveats aside, though, I remain fascinated by the idea of photography as a tool not just for capturing what we see (and know we’re seeing), but for fixing in place the elusive, obscure, un-luminous qualities of perceptual experience. Gafsou’s Vivants offer powerful and moving explorations of this theme.