148 - The Emotional Eye

If you walk the length of London's Portobello Road you reach the junction with Golborne Road. It used to be a good spot for rock bottom bric-a-brac stalls. I bought a pile of Top of the Pops albums for the kitsch covers.

This is one of my favourites '15 Tear Jerkers'.

'The mind's eye', is a phrase which expresses (some) people's ability to see virtually inside their heads, an imagined scene or object: it's a thought process.

There's another, phenomenon which I'll call 'the emotional eye'. Rather than projecting onto a virtual screen in your head, it projects onto your vision of the external world. 'Seeing the world through rose coloured glasses' is similar, but it refers to having an optimistic outlook. The emotional eye, projects onto pictures, and colours them with emotions triggered by memories of the viewer's lived experience.

When I got interested in photography, I slowly came to understand the phenomenon of the emotional eye. Photographs (mine) that I found exciting and engaging were completely flat and grey in other people's eyes. I posted picture after picture on the HCSP crit thread alongside many other newbie street photographers and we were all met with the same response: there's nothing there!

PAUSE

I need to expand this a bit to explain what I mean but today I've run out of time.