judging and deciding and seeing and making sense

I don’t know why I remain so astounded by the co-existence of subtle intuition and coarse stupidity, genuine insight and thick-headed idiocy, in so many of the human beings I know, myself notably included. It is presumably a universal trait of the human condition, and what puzzles me is that so few people seem to be capable of noticing that sometimes they are beasts and sometimes angels, to use Pascal’s definition of humanity (or whoever’s definition that was). But self-awareness does not seem to be as inbuilt into the human condition as the capacity to be both beast and angel. [To save someone a posted comment: of course Pascal says we are neither beast nor angel, not both together by turns.]

This was brought home to me tonight as I recalled the photographs to which I gave the awards in the populist “My Atlanta” photo show this past week. The exhibition is the annual chance for young photographers, amateurs with a camera, and maverick professionals to strut their stuff in a tape-it-up-and-show-it atmosphere. You get everything from drugstore-developed snapshots to framed and matted prints with small copyright symbols by the artist’s signature.

What I suddenly realized was how many of the twelve-year-olds and retirement home photographers were seeing, really seeing…making visual connections that go beyond some helpful professional’s suggestions of tricks to use in making a good picture. The photos were more than just happy accidents; the layers of vision and the subtle connections between adjacent objects were really there, and people who plainly did not spend their lives learning the craft of photography had picked up on them and put them in a color image.

Perhaps unbeknownst to me the middle school students and elderly African-American women who took these pictures are the children of college professors or retired medical professionals. Even so, the level of insight embodied in the choice of subject would be extraordinary; I’ve juried bygone shows of highly skilled and intelligent amateurs that demonstrated that they were, indeed, highly intelligent amateurs who should not quit their day job.

There were also, of course, an ample quantity of images by people of all ages who had earnestly read books on “how to take a good picture,” or who were putting together the teacher’s lessons on composition and contrast and such, and doing a creditable job of it.

My point is not the quality of the aesthetics (an interesting subtopic in itself) but the capacity to address contemporary issues and conundrums on a certain level without, presumably, being entirely aware that they were doing so. There are people one encounters who are consistently astounding in their ability to address both abstract and concrete problems of existence despite coming from circumstances that suggest they ought not to be capable of upending a boot filled with bodily fluids without consulting an instruction manual. There are others who are such a mixture of astonishing insight and complete incompetence that one is left even more amazed. And this unexpected combination of qualities is so commonplace that one wonders why one is ever amazed. Perhaps it is because so many people are good at pretending to get with the program.

My point, and it is my usual self-evident one, is that we are all sleepwalkers; we all know more than we know, and we know less and know it less well than our overweening pride will allow us to realize. This is totally obvious, and yet we are so wedded to the notion that we are internally consistent beings that we don’t see what is in front of our eyes. I vaguely noticed that the distribution of visual insight in the photographs in “My Atlanta” wasn’t correlative to the degree of training or the prestige of the educational institution in the case of the high schools, but this is one more case where the word “talent” is not so much elitist as unhelpful. What was being eshibited was not training or talent, but capacities to make a wide variety of correlations. And those correlations might not correspond to capacities to do anything else well, or they might be part of a wide variety of competencies.

All of this is, again, obvious to anybody who is good at interviewing job candidates, but nobody seems to bother to spell it out except in very specialized media. And even there, they exclude the parts of the puzzle that aren’t relevant to their immediate concerns. People who are quite competent at identifying skill sets and personal predilections in one sphere of activity seem to fall effortlessly back on categories such as “having a good eye” or being “extremely talented” when it comes to making distinctions in creatuve capacities, which is almost as useless as the broad categories vocational counselors used to employ in telling you the wrong answers to what kind of job you would be good at.

In my self-chosen role as visitor from another planet, I seem determined to puzzle out afresh what it is that human beings are doing and why they are doing it, with an air of bewilderment that they are doing it that way. Everyone else already knows this, and does not feel the need to belabor the self-evident. I have to sit around for almost a week before I figure out what I was pulling out and rewarding from the various categories of photography to which I had to assign prizes.

I have to assume there are vast realms of psychological documentation that relates to all this, but the sociological data I’ve come across hasn’t been terribly useful.