How to See
Untitled, Harlem, New York, 1963
When’s the last time you looked closely at something?
The Jack Shaiman Gallery’s decision to split its “Gordon Parks: Half and the Whole” exhibit in NYC made some sense. The West 24th Street location was given over to his potent images of social-justice protest — crowds holding signs and newspaper headlines about Blacks killed by police that could (and do) halo protests today, raised hands, a young Martin Luther King, Jr. and Malcolm X each sharp as a powerful idea, Muhammad Ali ready to fight in multiple rings. And police — glowering at those crowds, taking people away or itching to. My favorite image of this show is “Untitled, Harlem, New York” from 1963 (above), that shows a boy casually leaning on a police barricade as he watches a speech being given in the background. The police barricade reads “DO NOT CROSS,” but presumably the boy and the speaker are pictured in the act of crossing, of pushing against the familiar barriers erected to contain them.
The 20th Street gallery showcased many works that Gordon Parks is best known for, portraits vividly picturing a wide range of Black experience in America during segregation. Parks shows us people subjugated by their race but also living full lives, experiencing joy and leisure and boredom. Parks is originally from Fort Scott, Kansas, near where my father and his side of the family originate, and I knew somewhat about him. I’d seen many of these photographs in magazines or on the web (the Gordon Parks Foundation is a must follow on Instagram), but I had never seen them in person and at this size. The colors are nothing short of astonishing, rich and warm and ubiquitous. It’s also impossible to miss that so many of these photos contain the word “Colored,” designating entrances or areas or facilities that Blacks were restricted to, starkly revealing what life full of color looks like and the absurdity of prejudice against color or assigning “colored” a second-class status. Life, after all, is color, if you look.
Department Store, Mobile, Alabama, 1956
It’s tempting, I think, to understand visiting a gallery as engaging in seeing in its purest form. That’s why, of course, we go to galleries and museums — to look closely (but not touch). In fact, think just a little more, and museum going is about looking at the results of some intense looking by folks who have dedicated their lives to looking.
But gallery and museum going is an artificial kind of seeing, unlike the normal case. Pretty much right at the beginning of his influential book Ways of Seeing, John Berger writes:
“We only see what we look at. To look is an act of choice. As a result of this act, what we see is brought within our reach — though not necessarily within arm’s reach. … We never look at just one thing; we are always looking at the relation between things and ourselves. Our vision is continually active, continually moving, continually holding things in a circle around itself, constituting what is present to us as we are.” (WOS, p. 9)
Several interesting claims inhabit this passage, but the upshot is that seeing is an active relation between ourselves and the world — something we do — and we often choose where to direct our attention. And in directing our attention, our looking, we learn about ourselves as things embedded in the world.
Sounds good, but what does it mean for the act of looking to tell us about ourselves as things in the world? To look at anything is to see oneself. We as seers are implicated directly in the act of seeing. Think about where you are right now. Some things lie within your reach, some things beyond it. When you turn your head, the world seems stationary and you are doing the moving (not a trivial computational problem for our brains to solve, by the way). The space around you presents all sorts of opportunities for interaction — things you can grip, open and close, crawl under (if you had to), lift, climb, reach, fall off of. To move through the world is to constantly receive information about your position and capabilities in and relative to it. The psychologist J. J. Gibson developed what he called the ecological theory of perception, arguing that the perceiver and the perceived are not distinct components of a transaction. We see the world, he says, in terms of affordances, or opportunities offered to us as creatures able to interact with the world in our particular ways. According to Gibson, these affordances actually exist in the environment, created by our presence, which is to say that the world and its creatures complement each other, are invested in each other. To put the point slightly differently, when we look at anything, we can’t help but see it in terms of how we can act on it and how it can act on us. One therefore can’t look at the world without seeing oneself in it.
The brilliance of artists like Gordon Parks is that they reveal the social affordances around us that we so often miss and take for granted. I could have lingered in the Gordon Parks exhibit for hours, but NYC in February 2021 was still gripped by the pandemic, and the social-distanced line outside in the cold was long enough to make me feel guilty for staying. On the street, things looked different. New York seemed shot through with vibrant color: Yellow taxis looked almost buttery, a block of storefronts seemed as riotous as a bouquet. And I couldn’t help but notice that the delivery workers whizzing by on electric bikes, the security guards watching businesses, the people sweeping up trash into rolling bins, and those still riding the subway at that time, were almost entirely people of color. Here was (and is) American Gothic all around you if you look.
The past year and a half have been a challenging and revealing time. As things locked down, I (like most people) found myself online more. While so much of the internet became unbearable, Instagram became essential. I came across so many photographers engaged in Parks’s work, showing us lives full and unfolding, fighting, grieving, at play. Each time I opened the app, I was made part of a world that I could not ignore and ultimately didn’t want to. I looked forward to seeing what Brandon Bell witnessed in Minneapolis or Washington DC or anywhere he went. And David Guttenfelder. And Caroline Yang. And Patience Zalanga. And Holly-Marie Cato. And so many more.
To see images like these is to see oneself more clearly, to begin to grasp how one is implicated in what they show, how one is embedded in this world, how it acts upon one, and how one is called to act upon it.
When’s the last time you looked closely at something and saw yourself? When will be the next time? And what are you going to do?