Marvin Heiferman | Seeing Through Photographs

60% or 80% of the activity that goes on in your brain is about deciphering visual data and visual input that you get. There are scientists who've done a tremendous amount of research on this, and it's within 13 milliseconds that you know what a picture is of. You can look at a blurry picture and you'll know it's a bedroom, or a kitchen, or a street scene. You don't need to see detail. The power of photography is way more complicated than people admit to. And I think there's psychological and physiological reasons that we respond to things that we respond to, as well as intellectual and emotional ones. So it's wildly complicated and it's terrific. It's great, it's great. I loved the title of your book, Photography Changes Everything, because of course it does. And I thought maybe we'd start with talking a little bit about that project. I spent about three years reaching out to almost 100 people, asking them to think how photography changed what they did, because I was very interested not in the power of images as museums often talk about them, but in terms of the consequentiality of images and how they really transform things. I was sitting in a room with a bunch of environmental scientists surrounded by drones. Actual drones in the room? Yeah, drones were all there on shelves, right? And we were talking about the project they were doing, and they were showing me the kind of schematic God's-eye view down through the drone's flight path where you could look at every image that the drone made, and each drone was making 2,000 images a day, and that was all really interesting. But I turned around and I looked to the people in the room, thinking about Edward Steichen and aerial photography, and I said, “Does anybody here ever think about the history of aerial photography as you're doing this?” And they said, “No.” –Right? –Right. And I thought, well, that's a really interesting thing. I mean, photography for the people in that room was a tool. They didn't care about the history of it and what got them to where they needed to be in terms of images. Photography is used by everybody, and everybody uses it for all sorts of reasons, and images can be beautiful for all sorts of reasons, and useful for all sorts of reasons, and consequential for all sorts of reasons. Do you think it's important to tell a history of photography or do you think that that is sort of a 20th century goal? I think it's hugely important to talk about the history of the medium because it's not quite a universal language, and the idea that we're all visually literate is not quite true. We can all probably extract some very basic level of information from photographs but I think you have to learn to understand how images work and how images are constructed. Who made the picture, why did they make the picture, who edited the picture, who cropped the picture, who captioned the picture, what pictures did they leave out, what pictures are being censored? It's a malleable medium, and I think people need to be aware of that. That's one of the big goals in visual literacy is for people to understand how many different ways you can make and use and understand any kind of image. There's nothing like it, there's no other experience like it because when we're walking around the world, you don't have time to see everything around you. For a moment, you can stop something and look at it in a way that you normally wouldn't see it, and I think that's part of the real fascination with still photography. It's a kind of very existential, philosophical kind of medium. It lets you step outside yourself to kind of look at the world in a different way.