Pareidolia
Work Zone
Laying in the lakeside sand pleasantly exhausted from swimming during the heat of a Texas summer afternoon we kids would watch the legions of brilliant cumulus clouds marching north from the Gulf Of Mexico. “That one looks like an elephant” someone would say. “Look, that one over there is turning into a snake”. I never got that. The beauty of those puffing pristine florescences against the blue ocean of sky was enough for me.
It was only decades later when I photographed an oak tree clinging to a crag that it hit me, but not at the moment of framing the image and clicking the shutter. At home, when I saw my photo on the big screen an eye looked back at me, droll and elephantine. The spirit in things began to speak . . .
Pareidolia is
the tendency for perception to impose a meaningful interpretation on a nebulous stimulus, usually visual, so that one detects an object, pattern, or meaning where there is none.
Related terms are anthropomorph and zoomorph.
Related terms are anthropomorph and zoomorph.
When young I tended to resist this way of seeing, perhaps concerned that it would interfere with the appreciation of the essential beauty of a thing in itself.
But now I have the ability to contain both ways of seeing, my appreciation has expanded by accommodating that complexity. Photography has that way of deepening our visual world.