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Seeing in Two Dimensions
Posted on 15 September, 2011 in Inspiration | View Comments
Honed to perfection by the need to survive, the illusory skills of this tiny Plover are extraordinary. The bird has selected this minimalist scrape, before laying her clutch of eggs, in the knowledge that both the textural and tonal values of the beach will be perfect for camouflaging them. Ironically, my photograph does not do to her talents justice. As a photographer, I strive to make my photographs appear three-dimensional in the two dimensional world of photography – that way they stand out. The Ringed Plover is hard-wired to create the converse and strives to take her three-dimensional eggs and make them appear two-dimensional in the real world. That way, if you’re a predator, you’ll miss them.
In her book Art and Vision (ISBN 978-0810995543), Professor Margaret Livingstone sheds more light on our visual systems and demystifies what takes place when we see (read artist as photographer).
“As we look around, most of us think we ‘see’ a three dimensional world. Yet since each retina is a flat sheet of neural tissue, all the brain could acquire through the eyes are two flat images (one from each eye). The brain must somehow interpret these two flat images as three-dimensional space.
Furthermore, artists aspiring to representationalism face the inverse problem: they want to render the three-dimensional world they see onto a two dimensional canvas. The challenge is quite formidable if you spell it out explicitly: artists must look at a three dimensional scene with their two-dimensional retinas and then generate a two dimensional painting that appears three dimensional to viewers who look at it with their two dimensional retinas.
Since the retinal image in the eye is flat, you would think all artists would have to do is paint what the eyes sees, before the brain gets access to the information. The problem is that we don’t have conscious access to the retinal image; our visual perception is available to us only after the brain has processed it into a three-dimensional representation.”
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