I recommend eating chips An Essay by Sam Anderson www.nytimes.com Join me. Grab whatever you’ve got. Open the bag. Pinch it on its crinkly edges and pull apart the seams. Now we’re in business: We have broken the seal. The inside of the bag is silver and shining, a marvel of engineering — strong and flexible and reflective, like an astronaut suit. Lean in, inhale that unmistakable bouquet: toasted corn, dopamine, America, grief! We are the first humans to see these chips since they left the factory who knows when. They have been waiting for us, embalmed in preservatives, like a pharaoh in his dark tomb. Looking Closely is EverythingOne brick seeingdetailsfood
In the Eye of the Beholder An Essay from Field Notes on Science and Nature by Jonathan Kingdon Haven't you noticed?Wordless questioningOutlinesAgents of thought and experiment
Haven't you noticed? I remember my mother sitting me down at the age of about five with pencil and paper to draw an acacia tree in the yard while she busied herself with her own sketchbook. After a while she came over to see my efforts. “Splendid! But haven’t you noticed how the trunk narrows as it rises? And see how the branches flatten out sideways, not like that oleander over there, where they all go up at a steep angle. Now don’t rub that one out, just do another drawing to compare with the first one.” Looking Closely is Everything seeing
Wordless questioning The comparison of forms raises questions and drawing can be employed as a wordless questioning of form; the pencil seeks to extract from the complex whole some limited coherent pattern that our minds and eyes can grasp. The probing pencil is like the dissecting scalpel, seeking to expose relevant structures that may not be immediately obvious and are certainly hidden from the shadowy world of the camera lens. The World of the Sea
Outlines Photography teaches us that the very act of putting a line around the edge of an observed object is an artifice. Such outlines rarely appear in photographs, or, for that matter, in nature, and yet…and yet? An outline sketch that bears little relationships to the so-called objectivity of a photograph might actually transmit information to another human being more selectively, sometimes even more usefully, than a photograph. If the brain is unlike a camera in actively seeking outlines, there is the strong implication that “outline drawings” can represent, in themselves, artifacts that may correspond more closely with what the brain seeks than the charts of light-fall that photographs represent.
Agents of thought and experiment The act of drawing serves to remind us that hands are agents of thought and experiment. Photography has a great future, but no matter how much ancillary wizardry photography accumulates, it will not be in competition with “drawing” in the broadest sense of that term. There will always be a role for exploration by the hands, encumbered by no more than a piece of ocher or a stick of charcoal. Its practical utility is as a manifestation of the mind struggling with the meaning of what it encounters and what it wants to explore. thinkingdrawingunderstanding