My 2008 photographic series Choice of Focus explores issues of perception and the visual discards of one’s habitual modes of attention. In the text Sensation and Perception, written by Stanley Coren, Lawerence M. Ward and James P. Enns, the authors explain that attention operates on several levels which we subconsciously use simultaneously; while looking at our surroundings we are constantly orienting, filtering, searching, and preparing the visual information in our field of view. Coren et al explain that with attention we are “selecting from among already conscious visual experiences those that we will be able to report about and to which we will give special processing. This implies that we are aware of information, at least in vision, that we are not attending to, and that there is additional visual information about which we are unaware…The simplest way to select among several stimulus inputs is to orient our sensory receptors toward one set of stimuli and away from another.”
Choice of Focus exploits this notion visually by examining overlooked moments within the everyday and focusing in on them — exclusively. Photographs of reflections, peepholes, shadows and windows hint of alternate modes for navigating the habitual visual world and prompt a sentient relationship with our attention.
