It’s all chance. To learn about the quality of light and the particular way it falls, depends on the time of day, the angle of the sun at that moment in time and of course, is entirely contingent upon what I pay attention to. I don’t know anything about photography – aperture, exposure, ISO etc. But being conscious of photographing something, anything at all, for no one but myself, is changing the way I see.
At some juncture, you stop seeing because everything feels like a copy. That leaf is this leaf, that tree is this tree and as you go on, the likeness extends conceptually and ideologically – that idea is like this one, that person is like these people. Generalisation is not taxonomy (though I’m not particularly fond of the latter either). Classification helps us to find patterns I suppose, and to organise along these lines. I like similitude if it suggests relatedness, kinship (which the thesaurus tells me is one way to understand similitude). But generalisation and even taxonomy can skewer cognition, perpetuating a world view more than speaking to any kind of truth about the condition of things as they are.
Some days the leaf will just be a leaf, the tree, yet another tree. But there is room always, for those exceptions to the rule, for the odd day when everything seems quite distinct.
