Blinded By Vision

An analogy for contemplation.

There is an instinct, almost involuntary, that follows the act of making something. You finish a piece of writing, or you put the camera down after a shoot, or you walk out of the gym after a session that felt like it meant something, and the very first thing you do - before the sweat has dried or the file has saved - is look at it. Stare at it. Turn it over in your hands and hold it up to whatever light is available and try to see, right now, immediately, whether it was any good. Whether the thing you just poured yourself into was worth the pouring. I do this every time, without exception, and I would estimate that in the majority of those moments - more than I would like to admit - I walk away thinking it was not.

I shot a live show a while back, an artist I had been working with for a Tibi Close Friends project, and when I sat down that night to scroll through the images, I felt the whole thing collapse. The anxiety hit almost immediately - this was wrong, that was out of focus, I missed the moment, I ruined it. I closed the laptop convinced I had wasted the night. A couple weeks later, for reasons I cannot entirely explain, I opened the folder again. And what I found in there was not what I remembered. There were images I had no memory of taking - or, more accurately, images I had looked directly at and failed to see - that were, genuinely, some of the better photographs I have taken. They had been there the whole time. I just could not see them when I was staring.

Last summer I wrote a piece for my Substack about spider webs and fear, and I remember the feeling after I published it - that uneasy sense that it did not quite land, that the analogy was reaching, that maybe I should not have put it out. I moved on, wrote other things, forgot about it mostly. Then, almost a year later, I went back and read it, and my first thought was - did I write this? Not in a self-congratulatory way, but in genuine confusion, because the piece I was reading did not match the piece I remembered making. The distance had not changed the words. It had changed my ability to see them.

I have been thinking about why this happens - why the moment directly after creation is so consistently the worst moment to evaluate what you have created - and the closest I have come to an answer is in the way we see stars.

There is a technique that astronomers have used for centuries called averted vision. When you look at the night sky, the brightest stars are easy - you look directly at them and there they are. But the faint ones, the ones just barely bright enough to exist, behave differently. If you stare directly at a faint star, it disappears. Your eye cannot pick it up. The harder you focus, the less you see. But if you look slightly to the side of it, if you let your gaze drift just a few degrees off center, star appears in your peripheral vision, clear and unmistakable, exactly where direct focus failed.

This is not a metaphor. It is physiology. The center of your retina, the fovea, is optimized for detail, for color, for bright and obvious things. It is the part of your eye that reads text and recognizes faces. But it is not the most sensitive part. The edges of your retina are lined with rods, cells that detect light the middle cannot. These rods are quiet, they do not announce themselves the way the center of your vision does, but they see what the center misses. The faint star is not invisible. It is invisible to direct focus. The star has been there the entire time. You were simply using the wrong part of your eye to look for it.

I think this is exactly what happens when you finish something you have made and immediately try to judge it. You are staring at it with your fovea - the part of your awareness that is optimized for detail, for comparison, for the bright and obvious gap between what you intended and what you actually produced. And in that mode of seeing, the faint thing - that which makes the work actually good, the quality that lives in the margins, the accidents/choices you made without thinking - disappears. You are looking too directly. The signal is there, but it is not the kind of signal that direct scrutiny can detect.

I have been training for a competition lately, about five weeks in, and something has started to shift that I did not notice until I stopped looking for it. The runs are not easier. The workouts are not lighter. But there is a smoothness that was not there before - a fluency in the movement, a rhythm that I did not plan or earn through any single session. It arrived peripherally, the way a faint star does, in a moment where I was not asking whether I was getting better. I was just running. And the adaptation, which had been building invisibly for weeks, showed itself the moment I stopped staring at it.

Last week, while filming with Sid Simons for a Tibi Close Friends project, we placed his head directly in the window frame to catch the sunset behind him - that part was deliberate, the composition was ours. But what we could not have planned, what no amount of obsessing over angles and setup could have controlled, was the timing. The exact moment the light hit during the final song, the trajectory of the sun across the sky lining up with the take as if it had been choreographed. That was not us. We did the work to be in position. We framed the shot, we chose the window, we pointed the camera. And then the thing that made it extraordinary arrived on its own timeline, in a way that direct control could never have manufactured. The setup was the fovea. The perfection was peripheral.

I do not think it is a coincidence that the work I am proudest of - the photographs that still hold up, the writing that surprises me when I return to it - is almost never the work I felt best about in the immediate aftermath. The things I loved right away tend to be the obvious ones, the bright stars, the images that matched what I had pictured in my head. They are fine. They are competent. But the ones that linger, the ones I look back on and wonder how I made, those are always the faint stars. The ones I could not see at the time because I was staring directly at them, flooded with anxiety and the certainty that something had gone wrong.

Something had gone right. I just needed to look away long enough to see it.

So if you have recently made something - written something, built something, photographed something, begun something - and your immediate assessment is that it is not good enough, consider the possibility that you are not wrong about the work. You are wrong about the looking. Consider that the part of you doing the evaluating right now is your fovea, the detail-obsessed center that is magnificent at spotting flaws and blind to faint, extraordinary things. Consider that the truest version of what you have made will not reveal itself under direct examination, but will appear, months from now, in your periphery, on a night when you were not looking for it at all.

The star is already there. You just have to stop staring at it.

And let the edges of your vision do what they were built to do.