> ## 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. # Which parts of the way you see are actually yours? - URL: https://www.theblkgze.com/essays/which-parts-of-the-way-you-see-are-yours/ - Published: 2026-09-04T08:00:00.000Z - Updated: 2026-09-04T18:14:49.000Z - Description: We learn to see long before we pick up a camera. Photography then gives us another education, shaped by its masters, conventions and histories. The question is whether we can become conscious of that inheritance and choose what we reproduce. - Author: Shaun Connell - Tags: Essays We spend years learning how to see before photography teaches us that we are seeing incorrectly. Long before we pick up a camera with any serious intent, we have developed an intimate visual education. We know the faces we recognise, the bodies we trust, the places that feel like home. We learn to read a glance, a gesture, a posture. We learn what deserves our attention and what can remain at the edge of our vision. We learn all of this before we have the language to explain it. ![](https://www.theblkgze.com/content/images/2026/09/garry-winogrand-central-park-zoo-new-york-city-1964-1.jpg) Then we enter photography and discover the masters. Suddenly, some ways of seeing carry authority. There are photographs we are expected to admire, photographers we are expected to study, conventions we are expected to understand. We learn composition, light, distance, timing and subject. We learn what a serious photograph looks like, and gradually, what serious looking is supposed to feel like. This is presented as education, and much of it is. The history of photography contains extraordinary ways of seeing, and learning from those who came before us is part of becoming a photographer. But another education is happening alongside it. We are learning which ways of looking have been legitimised, which have been rewarded, and which have become so familiar that we no longer recognise them as choices. The danger is not learning from the past. It is forgetting that the past is teaching us how to look. Influence becomes instinct. Instinct becomes invisible. We think we have learned how to see when we have actually learned what photography expects us to see. Every photographer arrives at a subject carrying images they did not make. Some came from photographers they admire. Others came from films, newspapers, advertising, museums, family albums and social media. Some were encountered so early and so often that they no longer feel like influences. They feel like reality. This is how a gaze becomes normal. A particular distance from a subject begins to feel objective. A particular treatment of poverty begins to feel documentary. A particular way of photographing a body becomes beautiful, truthful or serious. Certain images are rewarded often enough that their visual logic disappears into the background. We stop seeing the convention and start seeing the subject. This becomes particularly complicated when the subject is Black life. Photography has never simply recorded Blackness. It has participated in constructing the ways Blackness is seen. Black bodies have been photographed as evidence, spectacle, anthropological material, social problem, political symbol and object of fascination. The history matters not only because of what those photographs show, but because repetition can turn a way of looking into an expectation. And that expectation does not belong only to the people who created it. A Black photographer can inherit it too. Being Black does not automatically produce a Black gaze, just as photographing Black people does not automatically produce a Black perspective. A photographer can know their subject intimately and still reach instinctively for a visual language developed elsewhere. They can photograph their own community while reproducing the expectations that photography has attached to it. The camera carries those expectations into the encounter. ![](https://www.theblkgze.com/content/images/2026/09/decarava-body-1-1.webp) Roy DeCarava, **Edna Smith, bassist*, 1950. Consider the photographs of Roy DeCarava. Much of their power lies in what they refuse to make immediately available. His pictures of Black life can be quiet, dark and ambiguous. Faces may emerge only partially from shadow. Context can be withheld. A gesture can remain a gesture rather than becoming an explanation. That refusal matters because photography often rewards clarity. We are accustomed to photographs that tell us where we are, who matters, what has happened and how we should feel about it. DeCarava's photographs can make the viewer stay with uncertainty instead. Black life does not have to become evidence before it becomes worthy of looking at. That is not simply an aesthetic preference. It changes the relationship between photographer, subject and viewer. The subject is not being organised entirely for the viewer's comprehension. The photograph leaves something intact. And this points towards a more difficult understanding of photographic authenticity. ![](https://www.theblkgze.com/content/images/2026/09/190923_r34990.webp) Roy DeCarava, **Jimmy Garrison, bassist*, 1961. We often speak about authentic photography as though it comes naturally from proximity. Photograph your own community, your own culture, your own experience, and the resulting photographs will somehow be more truthful. But proximity does not guarantee understanding, and identity does not make a gaze innocent. We can be close to something and still look at it through somebody else's eyes. The problem, then, is not that we have influences. We cannot avoid them. There is no pure gaze waiting underneath the canon, culture and history, untouched and ready to emerge once we have rejected enough photographers. The task is harder. We have to notice what has entered our way of looking without our permission. What have we been taught to notice? What have we been taught to ignore? What kinds of bodies have we learned to photograph as beautiful, threatening, vulnerable or exotic? What kinds of suffering have we learned to consider visually meaningful? When we photograph someone who looks like us, whose expectations are we satisfying? When we photograph someone who does not, whose idea of them are we carrying into the frame? These are not simply questions about technique. They are questions about responsibility. Perhaps the photographer's greatest act of authorship is not deciding what to photograph, but deciding which inherited ways of seeing to reproduce and which to refuse. That changes what photographic education ought to mean. We should still learn from the masters. But we should also learn to look at the authority we have given them. We should study photographs not only for what they reveal about their subjects, but for what they have taught generations of photographers to expect from looking. We should ask not only why a photograph works, but what kind of gaze it makes feel natural. Because the most consequential thing a photographer inherits may not be a style, a technique or a way of composing a frame. It may be a way of seeing other people. We learn to see long before we learn to photograph. That first visual education is intimate, embodied and largely our own. Photography arrives later with its histories, hierarchies and authorities, offering us a vocabulary for looking and, sometimes, quietly replacing the one we already had. Perhaps becoming a serious photographer is therefore not about finding your own gaze. It is about becoming responsible for the one you have inherited. And before the next photograph is made, there is a question worth sitting with: **Which parts of the way you see are actually yours?**