> ## Content Index > Fetch the complete content index at: https://www.theblkgze.com/llms.txt > Use this file to discover other available public pages before exploring further. # What does experience let you see? - URL: https://www.theblkgze.com/essays/what-experience-lets-you-see/ - Published: 2025-04-20T08:00:00.000Z - Updated: 2026-09-04T13:51:19.000Z - Description: A camera can record what is in front of it, but it cannot explain why a photographer noticed that moment in the first place. Experience is part of photographic knowledge, but it is not the same as certainty. - Author: Shaun Connell - Tags: Essays There are photographs you understand before you can explain why. Something in them feels familiar. Not necessarily because you have seen the scene before, but because you recognise the way it has been seen. This is difficult to describe in photographic language. We are more comfortable talking about composition, exposure, timing and technique. We can point to what the photographer did with the camera. It is harder to talk about what the photographer brought to the camera: memory, experience, expectation, cultural knowledge, instinct. Yet these things matter. For Black photographers, especially, experience can change what becomes visible. A look between two people. The significance of a particular gesture. The difference between celebration and performance. The atmosphere of a room that an outsider might enter without understanding what has just happened. These are not technical skills, but neither are they simply feelings. They are forms of knowledge. This is one reason the idea of a neutral photographic gaze is so difficult to sustain. Every photographer learns to look somewhere, and every photographer learns what to overlook. LaToya Ruby Frazier's *The Notion of Family* makes this visible through the intimacy of its subject. Her photographs of her grandmother, mother and herself do not simply document a family. They emerge from a relationship in which history, memory and personal experience are already present before the camera appears. A photograph such as *Grandma Ruby and Me* carries information that cannot be reduced to what is visibly happening in the frame. The relationship between the people pictured is part of what gives the photograph its meaning. The camera records the image. It does not record everything the photographer knows about the moment. That distinction matters because lived experience is sometimes treated as if it were instinct, and instinct as if it were automatically correct. For Black photographers, there can be a temptation to describe this knowledge as something located in the gut, the heart or even the spirit. There is something useful in that language. It recognises forms of knowledge that photographic institutions have historically struggled to name. But we should be careful about turning intuition into another myth. Experience can sharpen attention, but it can also create assumptions. Familiarity can reveal things that distance conceals, but it can also make us stop looking. A photographer can know the culture and misunderstand the person. They can recognise the setting and miss what is happening inside it. They can photograph their own family and still bring a story to the frame that the person in front of the camera does not recognise as their own. Knowledge is not the same as certainty. This is where the Black gaze becomes more interesting than the idea of simply seeing ourselves represented by ourselves. The question is not whether Black photographers possess some innate ability to make more truthful photographs of Black life. The question is what their particular histories, relationships and ways of knowing allow them to notice. Ming Smith's photographs, for example, often resist the demand for photographic clarity. Her work can feel atmospheric, elusive and intuitive, asking us to attend to what a photograph communicates beyond a straightforward account of what happened. The image does not become powerful because it explains everything. Its power can come from what experience has taught the photographer to leave open. That is a different understanding of photographic knowledge. It does not depend on the camera revealing everything. It recognises that seeing can involve sensing what cannot be fully described. The family photograph offers another way into this. Long before Black photographers entered galleries and competitions, cameras were being used in homes to record birthdays, graduations, church services, holidays, funerals and ordinary afternoons. These photographs were not made to satisfy an editor or impress a jury. They were made because someone thought the moment mattered. The reasons for making the photograph were already a form of looking. A grandmother's portrait might matter because everyone in the family knows what she has meant to them. A photograph of friends outside a house might preserve a relationship that no archive would consider historically significant. The photograph does not need to explain its importance to an institution. Its meaning exists within a community of memory. This is why technical competence, while necessary, cannot be the whole measure of photographic knowledge. A perfectly exposed photograph can still reveal very little. An image that breaks conventional rules can sometimes tell us something that those rules would have prevented us from seeing. The point is not to reject technique for feeling. It is to recognise that technique operates within a larger practice of attention. Every photographer is taught where to place the frame. Fewer are taught to ask why they are placing it there. Experience can answer part of that question. Memory can answer part of it. Relationship can answer part of it. Culture can answer part of it. None provides the whole answer. That may be the more useful way to think about the "gut" in Black photography. Not as a mystical quality belonging to Black photographers, and not as an alternative to photographic knowledge, but as a reminder that knowledge does not only arrive through instruction. Some of it is carried into the frame through lives already lived. The photograph is therefore never just what the camera sees. It is also what the photographer has learned to notice.