I see you seePhotography has a strange kind of physcial magic. A fraction of a second, plucked from the flow of time, pinned down forever, 1/250th of a second of your life. What I see through the viewfinder is never quite what you see in the final image. The way I frame a shot, the way I read the light, the way I choose to press the shutter, it's all mine. After that, once the photograph exists, it belongs to you too. You bring your own history, your own mood, your own way of seeing.
I've been thinking a lot about this lately, how two people can stand in the same place and see and feel something completely different. This tells us something about the nature of perception itself. The camera is just a tool. But empathetic vision? That's something else entirely.
So, I wonder how much of photography and life is about what's in front of me, and how much is about what's inside me. Two people (lets call them photographers, but we all have eyes) could walk the same street, pass the same faces, stand under the same stars, and yet their images would tell entirely different stories. One might be drawn to the symmetry of the buildings around them, the other might lock onto the (e)motion, the calculating smile of a stranger caught mid-thought.
We don't just capture the world as it is; we capture what we need to see. The details we hang on to say more about us than the world or people around us. I've noticed that when I'm feeling twitchy and unconfident, my photos lean towards wide shots, open spaces, escape routes. When I'm grounded, I'm drawn to the close details, hands, textures, quiet moments that anchor me. I don't always realise it in the moment, but looking back, my photos feel like little breadcrumbs leading me to where my head was at, long after I've forgotten how I felt at the time. It's a nice archive to have.
That's the thing, isn't it? We never see objective reality. We see our version of it. We see through a lens shaped by experience, by mood, by the weight of the day. Photography just makes it painfully obvious.
That's the thing about images, about life. We think we're documenting the world as it is, but we're really just reflecting ourselves back at us. Two people can stand shoulder to shoulder and see something completely different, not because reality shifts, but because we bring our own weight to it. Our histories, our biases, our wounds, and our joys. They all act like invisible filters, shaping the way we compose our life's narrative.
I've been guilty of thinking my way of seeing was the way of seeing. That my perspective was somehow more attuned, more honest. Photography humbles you. You show someone a photo you love, maybe the way the light hit a window just right, or how a stranger's silhouette lined up with a the sun and they barely react. Then, shocker, they pause on an image you discarded, something that felt like a bin job. "This one," they say. "This one makes me feel something."
It's a reminder that no two sets of eyes will ever see the same world. Your truth, my truth. The way I saw it, the way you feel it.
That's why I'm drawn to street photography, why I keep coming back to it even when my fingers are stiff from the cold or my feet ache from hours of walking the same few streets. To accept that what I see is just one version of the story, and the reminder that every person I pass is living a completely different narrative. That kid kicking a bottle cap down the street might be thinking about absolutely nothing, just lost in the rhythm of his own movement, jealous of him, to be honest.
Here we stand, behind our (life) lens, making assumptions. Turning moments into something else. Freezing time, distorting it, translating it into something that might not even be real.
One day, someone will look at that 250th of a second, perhaps years later, someone who wasn't even there, and they'll find a new meaning in it. One I never saw. One I never intended. And so, I see, you see.
