Christopher Howse

What the eye don’t see

 

issue 20 August 2011

Since I began to watch films on video and not so much in cinemas, I have found that I sometimes get the itch to rewind reality itself, in order to check on what I have seen. There must be many oddities in my way of seeing of which I am less aware. Julian Rothenstein, a one-man art movement, intends to expose some of them in The Redstone Book of the Eye, a collection of almost 300 full-page pictures with very little commentary.

It’s about seeing, and the eye is secondary, really, even though we are drawn to others’ eyes in daily conversation. Or in some cases we avoid eye-contact. In British culture this may signify guilt; in Caribbean culture it may signify deference. It is a pity to mistake the one for the other. Rothenstein includes a photograph by the Barcelona photographer Joan Colom of a man in a crumpled suit, sitting on the kerb and crying aloud (one can almost hear him), while a young man with his girlfriend and an old woman turn to look at him, as they pass by.

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