Do You See What I See?
By Gary Rea
By Gary Rea
Do You See What I See? By Gary Rea Many years ago, while riding in my father’s car, looking out the window, he asked me what I was looking at. “I’m just observing how the light falls on everything and how it changes the way things look,” I replied. He said, “Really?!,” seemingly surprised at this. But, for me, it was just how I had always observed the world around me. Especially at different times of the day, such as early morning or late afternoon, or by the artificial lighting of night, I have always been fascinated with the appearance of people, places and things under various lighting situations. This has just been a part of my life since earliest childhood. What surprised me about my father’s reaction that day was that, apparently, this was something new and undiscovered, for him; something he’d perhaps rarely, if ever, given any thought to, and this is apparently the case for most people. People, especially these days, seem oblivious to light and shadow and how it alters the way things appear. They see only objects, without a thought as to how the objects appear, let alone why they do. Even if, on some subliminal level, they do notice these effects, it never registers as anything significant. Their minds are too cluttered with the claptrap and trivia of their everyday lives what’s for dinner tonight? What’s on TV? And so on… To be fair, I tend to notice light and shadow and its effects upon the world around us more than others do, not just because I always have, since I was a little boy, but because I’m a photographer and, in particular, a photographer whose main interest and whose style is entirely concerned with these effects of light and shadow. Thus, I’m always more attuned to the waythings look, and I always have been, even long before I began to incorporate them into my images. Those images, or the small selection of them I present to you here, are, as always, exemplary of those observations I have made. Whether you’re a fellow photographer or just someone who is interested in my work, it is my hope that you will see in these photographs what I saw with my eyes, what I saw through my lens, and ultimately, what I saw in my mind’s eye well before I picked up my camera and walked out my door to go see what I could see. Gary Rea December 2019