Picturing vision

Abstract

Kant taught us to think of the faculty of imagination as an ingredient of perception. Vision, thus, is not only opened to the present but also to the absent, for instance through expectations or memories. Our ways of seeing are literally formed by normative presumptions and culturally predetermined ideas. This makes visual perception a sort of an image-making activity in the context of a practice. It is the practice that regulates what can be perceived in which way or what is overlooked. As an activity it is neither solely a pure construction of individual viewpoints, nor a pure representation of the physically present world. Rather, it is the result of the reciprocal tension between the perceiver and the perceived.