Lopez: ‘Learning to see’

 Barry Lopez believed in the community of artists. He read certain poets and found their poems healing. He suspected he shared sensibilities with them.

He looked at the photographs of Robert Adams and suspected, before they struck up a friendship, that they shared sensibilities. Adams and Lopez met when the Amon Carter Museum in Fort Worth had a show of Adams’s work. The show’s coordinator asked Adams if he’d like her to ask anyone to speak about his work on his behalf. Adams replied that Lopez might be good. Adamas didn’t know Lopez but had read Lopez’s writing and thought they shared sensibilities.

Lopez tells the story in “Learning to see,” a penetrating essay on photography, seeing, noticing, paying attention.

Before he became known as a writer, Lopez was a landscape photographer. He gets his finger on an aspect of photography that’s fascinating to me.

Humans have a peculiar view of wildlife because of the images we routinely see. We see photographs of animals looking serene, inquisitive, nurturing or regal. We forget that the published photographs we see have been through editors. We rarely see photographs of animals mating or eviscerating prey. The overall picture we have of wildlife is skewed by what is missing.

In his essay, Lopez asks about the same kind of bias in the family photo album. We collect images that nudge memory. But it’s not a complete record of a life. And the images are missing context. We often have trouble establishing something as basic as sequence. It’s a record stripped of the “spine of narrative,” as Lopez puts it.

Photographs are an interesting, but risky, way to tell a story. A writer who tells a story as a series of sharp images runs similar risks, I think. 

• Source: Barry Lopez, About This Life; New York: Vintage Books, 1998. “Learning to see” is on pp. 223-39.