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Happy Thanksgiving
22 November 2018
In the arts, perspective is a technique of rendering three-dimensional objects realistically on a two dimensional plane. More generally, it is just someone's point of view that can sometimes actually represent a profound understanding of a subject.
The View in 2006. Olympus 730 (7-Mp, 3x zoom) at f5, 1/640 second and ISO 80.
Photography cannot escape the task of reducing three dimensions to two. Our optics, fortunately, do the dirty work of making that a credible transformation. We don't have to pick a vanishing point or draw guide lines through our composition to it like Masaccio had to do.
But what we choose to photograph is subject to our perspective, our way of looking at things, our point of view. That perspective can be quite narrow (as in a personal style) or much broader, understanding the subject from more than one point of view.
That's one reason photojournalists are part of every conversation. They are immersed in both the political and the personal, the ephemeral and the eternal.
The turkey doesn't matter. The company you keep does.
What's that got to do with Thanksgiving, you wonder.
Well, we're talking turkey. But turkey is not always a bird basting in the kitchen oven for a few hours while the Redskins and Cowboys sweat it out on some football field.
Sometimes the turkey is bought already cooked and merely warmed up. Sometimes the turkey is served at a restaurant. Sometimes the turkey is actually a ham.
The turkey doesn't matter. The company you keep does. That's a perspective on the holiday you are no doubt familiar with.
Twelve years ago we joined some friends at the top of the Hilton in San Francisco for a Thanksgiving buffet that included a chocolate fountain among its charms. But what really impressed us was the view. So wee pulled a little digicam out of our hat (so to speak) and snapped a picture.
You think you know a place and then you take an elevator up to some lofty perch from which you have never gazed out before and struggle to identify one landmark or another.
Our perspective had changed.
We could see a bit further. Our horizon had been expanded. We could embrace more of the world.
In these days of narrowing points of view that may seem to be an uncommon perspective. But we think it's as inevitable a one as photography's mapping of three dimensions into two. It's unavoidable. And it returns a dividend of incalculable value.
Love the world and the world will love you.