To gaze to be gazed

Photograph by Leo Ramirez

There is a big difference between skills and behaviors. Skills are the things that we have learned to do and that, over time, we consciously improve with practice and a good feedback loop. On the other hand, behaviors are fundamental changes in how we interact with the world, including people, animals, nature, and objects. Skills don’t define us, but our behaviors do.

Photography is a discipline; at an instrumental level, it is a skill that anyone can learn; in fact, one of the most attractive characteristics of Photography is that it can be taught and learned; it does not require any particular physical skill, and the set of fundamental concepts is reasonably small.

However, taking photographs is different from behaving as a photographer. Photographer behavior requires a specific mindset, another form of interaction with the world, which develops around the gaze, a fundamental change, on a physical level, in the way we look.

Gazing is an action; again, gazing is an action; once again, gazing is an action. As a photographer does, looking turns the object of the gaze into a subject, something that must be understood and, eventually, captured. This behavior, this instinct to fix our gaze on something, has more to do with us than with the object itself. As Lacan elaborated in his theory of the gaze, we search in what we gaze for something that gazes at us, “we…