If we let it, our imagination can find patterns and pictures in everything we see. We see, invent or import meaning where none really exists. Until, of course, we see, import or invent it. Then suddenly it is conjured into being by… what? By noticing, by imagining and, indeed, by photographing.
Polyphemus was a one-eyed giant in the Odyssey, who killed and ate four of Ulysses’ men. Ulysses blinded him with a pointed, fire-hardened stick, then escaped with his remaining men by clinging beneath the bellies of Polyphemus’s sheep, so the giant would not detect them as he touched the back of each sheep as it left his cave.
Each picture in Charlie Lemay’s 88-page book, Seeing (2014, www.charlielemay.net), is accompanied by an aphorism on the facing page. Opposite ‘Polyphemus’…
