Seeing … What? Four Images and Their (In)Visibility

Abstract:To see is to observe, to attend to. It is essentially to understand, to stand under what hides itself in the field of vision. However, to the extent that understanding implies nonknowing, seeing brings with it an unseeing that haunts the horizon of the visible. This essay addresses the idea of the invisible by looking at four images—a simple line drawing, two photographs, and a painting—and unpacks them according to their modes of presentation and varying degrees of verisimilitude. This is to show how unseeing makes possible the insight that the image is but also the absence that the act of vision necessarily incurs. The essay's objective is to elucidate what "seeing something" actually means, especially when the images one faces are often twice removed from the objects they represent, as is increasingly the case in today's digitalized or mediated world.