Training to look

This is not Marx with bazooka, although that will be equally intriguing. This is Miroslav Tichy with one of his self-made cameras. Out of trash, antithetical to all the dazzling megapixel ones, the old man's camera is laughing at us: that we have paid too much attention to the media and forgot about looking. In what ways should we train our "look"?

When all the frustrations of apertures, speeds, focuses, lights, filters, angles, . . . have come to no salvation of mediocrity, to concentrate on the essence of looking means, for one thing, to forget worrying about how many functions your cameras have and how expensive they are. 

Laughable as it is, it is 100% designed and crafted by this old man -- for the most sensual looking. How to look at your subjects and be certain about the pictures you want to take seems to be a much better subject to think about for every photographer, and also not only limited to photographers. And the results (See the picture right below) seem to cast serious doubts on the cameras we each have in our hands: Do we need to spend what we have spent for the cameras that nevertheless do not seem to excel this old man's, judging by the results? Are we using the expensive cameras to hide our deep insecurity of our inability/mediocrity? With all the worries of the control details and technical know-how, buttons to push and wheels to turn, we seem to be further away from the question of looking, from why and how we need to be closer to our photo subjects.  There always seems to be something that hinders us from coming closer to the subject -- caressing it with our minds and hands, desire and love, contemplation and action. 

Here comes the old man, an antihero of a commodity-fetishized world, quenching us inside his trash camera world and forcing us to rethink the potentials of whatever we have in our hands and our minds. With his old eyes and old desires, he is looking at the subject, single-mindedly. At the least attentive and unnoticed moment, he triggers the click.