The picture problem

How do pictures affect our vision? A nice way to answer the question was given by Malcom Gladwell in his article “The Picture Problem”: the problem is what you see in the picture, what information you have to make sense out of it. Basic problem is that when you mount a “a four-million-dollar camera” on a plane, the picture is “nearly perfect, and there are few cultural reflexes more deeply ingrained than the idea that a picture has the weight of truth.”
Therefore the “human task of interpretation is often a bigger obstacle than the technical task of picture-taking.”
A great exemplification of this problem is the work of the Photographer Tomas van Houtryve. In order to show the perception problem he flips the vision, challenging our assumptions about what we’re really looking at.
As many technology create new ways of watching, they create new posibilities for perception, but they do not really change human assumptions.
Enjoy his video of the project Blue Sky Days: https://vimeo.com/128202299