VISUAL EXPERIENCE IN CREATIVE PHOTOGRAPHY, USED WRONGLY, DOES MORE HARM THAN GOOD

Visual experience is what we call frequently looking at other people’s good work. It is believed to train the eye and develop aesthetic taste. In many ways that is true. Looking at good work, a person experiences a certain depth of feeling, thought and level of presentation. Having known this feeling, the viewer no longer settles for less. And that is wonderful.

But when it comes to creating their own work, authors often start simply copying other people’s works. Sometimes consciously, sometimes not.
Visual experience trains a very quick reaction to notice exactly those objects, combinations of colour and form... that a person has seen a lot of. In this way a person creates templates of behaviour for themselves through their visual experience. The limits of their attention.

The problem is not only that a person quickly catches template combinations with their attention, but also that as soon as they notice their template, they have to make a big effort to see something more and break out of it. You can train yourself on many templates, but they will still be frames. In the end a person notices only what they have trained themselves on through visual experience, repeating the same thing again and again.

You can often tell whose works an author has been looking at. This is not what is called "being inspired" or "learning". It is called "mindless copying".

For visual experience to really enrich you, you need not only to look at other people’s works and repeat them, but also to understand why the author made them that way. Why they chose a particular subject and showed it like that. Why they chose particular objects and composition, exactly that colour palette for this scene, what task the author is solving and by what means. Then it will not be template copying but an expansion of subjects, types of tasks and ways of solving them. And most useful of all – thinking will develop, and it can lead to completely new solutions.

It is easier to follow new publications and discuss them in our Telegram channel