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A piece by New York Times columnist David Brooks caught my attention recently because it dealt in part with precisely that. “Attention is a moral act,” he wrote. Even though paying attention is the crux of what I do as a landscape photographer, and it is a subject I have written about many times, I have never thought about it quite that way. So I did some digging and discovered Brooks had addressed this subject before in a book entitled How to Know a Person: The Art of Seeing Others Deeply and Being Deeply Seen. In keeping with the subtitle of Brooks’ book, his statement about attention being a moral act was given in the context of seeing others deeply and being seen.
Brooks borrowed this thought from psychiatrist Iain McGilchrist, as he readily acknowledges. “Our attention is responsive to the world, but the world is responsive to our attention,” McGilchirst writes in his book, The Master and his Emissary. He maintains that the process is reciprocal: “It is not just that what we find determines the nature of the attention we accord to it, but that the attention we pay to anything also determines what it is we find.” McGilchrist adds, “One way of putting this is to say that we neither discover an objective reality nor invent a subjective reality, but that there is a process of responsive evocation, the world ‘calling forth’ something in me that in turn ‘calls forth’ something in the world.”
Needless to say, McGilcrist’s understanding of the world and our relationship to it run counter to the dominant materialist mindset of the age. The English philosopher Owen Barfield concurs with McGilcrist, asserting that we are deluded in thinking “the mind of man is a passive onlooker at the processes and phenomena of nature.” Barfield theorized that human consciousness is evolving and has reached a stage he called “camera civilization.” Like the workings of a camera, we believe “the mind is something which is shut up in a sort of box called the brain” – a “mere recorder of an external world, not a participant in its creative life.”
As a landscape photographer, I know a bit about cameras. When you look through the viewfinder, it’s easy to objectify what you see through the lens. The world exists out there, and you’re in here looking not at the world itself but at an image of the world captured on your camera. In effect, there is not one world but two – or three, if you count the image in your mind’s eye. However, quantum physicists would tell us there is no real boundary between what we normally think of as the exterior world and the interior world of thoughts and perceptions. “The world is given to me only once, not one existing and one perceived,” wrote physicist Erwin Schrödinger. “Subject and object are only one.”
When I have my camera in hand, I sometimes get the uncanny sense that the subject of my photograph has been lying in wait for me to take its picture. (I say “its” because I mostly shoot landscapes, and my subjects do not normally smile for the camera.) Regardless of subject matter, the photojournalist Henri Cartier-Bresson advises that “your eye must see a composition or an expression that life itself offers you,” as if there were an active collaboration between artist and subject. Similarly, the ceramicist Mary Caroline Richards once said the artist’s task is to “allow the centered clay to live into a form which it would itself declare.” Was she suggesting that an inert lump of clay was somehow giving shape to the vessel formed at the potter’s wheel?
As with any visual arts medium, photography is not about trying to impose an idea upon one’s subject – in fact, it is more nearly the opposite. As Richards says, you are allowing your subject to declare itself to you. I get the sense sometimes that what I see though my lens is what I am being shown. Not that my subject is nudging me and whispering, “Hey, look at me.” It’s more that the act of seeing and the fact of being seen are one and the same.
Is there a word for this reciprocity between subject and object when proper attention is paid? Call it love. The word is most obviously appropriate when two people are involved, a couple who are head over heels, two dear friends or a parent and child. But the term can be applied much more broadly: a ceramicist and her clay, a chef and his cooking, a miser and his gold, to say nothing of a photographer and his subject. A man in my church was recently asked, “What gives you spiritual nourishment?” His answer: “I like to fix things.” Indeed, if there were something in my church that was broken, he’d be the one to fix it. For him, it’s a labor of love.
“Attention is the most basic form of love,” writes Tara Brach, a clinical psychologist and teacher of Buddhist meditation. “By paying attention we let ourselves be touched by life, and our hearts naturally become more open and engaged.” I would suggest that Jesus’ pronouncements on love might be understood in this light. “Love your neighbor as yourself,” Jesus commanded. By this he meant everybody, not just the ones we think are worth paying attention to.
All well and good, but what if my neighbor is a jerk? Am I expected to love somebody I don’t even like? Here the problem may be that something is lost in translation when the original Greek of the New Testament is rendered in English. Whereas English has essentially one word for love, ancient Greek has three: eros for the love between the couple who are head over heels, phileo for the love between dear friends, and agape for which there is no exact English equivalent. That is the word Jesus used when he commanded people to love one another. Agape is usually translated as unconditional or selfless love, which is both more and less than what we normally think of with the word love.
That becomes clear with another of Jesus’ commandments: “Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you.” How can I do that when my neighbor is not only a jerk, he’s also out to get me? Here is helps to think of agape love in light of another term Tara Brach uses: radical acceptance. Think of Martin Luther King, Jr., whose house was bombed during the Montgomery bus boycott, who was set upon by police dogs and fire hoses during the Birmingham civil rights campaign, who was brutally beaten by state troopers in the march from Selma to Montgomery, Alabama. He was wiretapped on orders from the U.S. Department of Justice and hounded by the FBI. I can’t image Dr. King felt much affection for those who attacked and jailed him and threatened the life of his family. And yet he instructed his followers to resist evil without resorting to retaliation or violence. He preached empathy and reconciliation, which started with radical acceptance of his adversaries as he found them without acquiescing to the injustices they perpetrated. This required him to pay close attention to those who persecuted him so he understood their perspectives and motivations. Attention is indeed a moral act
David Brooks, “How to Save a Sad, Lonely, Angry and Mean Society,” New York Times, (January 24, 2024)
Matthew 22:37-39
John 13:34-35
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