Different tones of white:Whitescapes

 First I began by superimposing a white sheet of paper to a white binder. I started to note differences in the hues of white. The white binder started to look more creamy and the sheet of paper was more blueish.

 Then I compared the white sheet of paper to the white wall and there was an even more dramatic difference between the two. The wall became more yellow and brown while the paper became more red/pink.

I turned off one of the lights and noted that the wall became more brown and less of a bright yellow and the white paper became more blue. 

original Ad logo- Dairy Queen

Photoshop

In Ways of Seeing by Jon Berger, he speaks about how we view the world around us and how we try and put it into words. It is fascinating how as Berger says, "seeing comes before words". We are born with eyes that glance at the world and capture it, and as we grow we try and describe it with words that we are beginning to learn. It all comes in through our sight before being spoken. Every image is taken by someone that wants to capture that moment. The same with painters, they decide on what particular moment should be recreated according to the way they feel about that instance. That's why when we see an image or a painting we are looking at the visual through the photographer's lens or artist's eyes. Although it is their personal perception of a moment in time, the viewers also bring out their own personal way of seeing that image, therefore it becomes not just the artist's but the viewers perception of that image. Jon Berger says,"The way we see things is affected by what we know and what we believe." But, what we see also defines much of what we know and believe. Therefore, its an equilibrium between the two that constitutes what we believe, what we know, and how we will judge what we see.  It also made me realize that most of everything we see comes with a source of bias. This bias comes from 2 things, the way we interpret it according to what we know, believe, and have seen before, as well as our power to decide over what we see and not see. For example, Berger talks about how camera changed the way we looked at paintings. Taking pictures of a painting we liked and multiplying the image in order for other people to look at it, is never the same as coming into a museum or the setting where the painting was purposely set and admiring an art piece. The environment that surrounds the painting is part of the meaning of that painting and once that painting is photographed and moved into peoples homes or offices, the meaning of the painting changes according to the environment in which it was brought into, but has no purpose of being there. It is so difficult to see without having any personal conjectures or biased opinion on the painting, because we are living through our own eyes and thus own believes, which will always have a part of what we see and appreciate.