The Art Of Noticing

There is a particular kind of light that exists for about twenty minutes after sunrise. It arrives low and unhurried, moving across surfaces at an angle that ordinary daylight never finds. It catches the side of things – the edge of a wall, the rim of a cup, the spine of a book left on a table – and makes them briefly extraordinary. Many are asleep when it happens; I spent years being one of them.

It was my camera that got me out of bed.

The first instinct, when you pick up a camera seriously, is to look for the obvious things. The grand view, the composed scene, the moment that announces itself to you. You chase the dramatic. You want the shot that earns its place, the one that justifies the early start, the cold weather or the long walk. For a while, that feels like enough, until slowly, almost without noticing, your perception changes and you begin to see differently.

Golden morning light does something that no other light quite manages. It doesn't illuminate evenly, instead, it reveals selectively. It picks out texture, throws long shadows, turns the most familiar streets into something you've never quite seen before. I have walked the same stretch of Oxford many times. In the afternoon light it is beautiful. In golden morning light it is astonishing; the stone warm and deep, the water catching fire, the whole city briefly remade. The same place. A different hour. An entirely different world.

This is what photography taught me: that the world is not fixed. It changes by the hour, and most of those changes go unwitnessed.

I spent most of my life, as most of us do, moving through the world at pace. The brain is ruthlessly efficient. It identifies what it needs, files away what it doesn't, and gets on with the business of the day. We stop noticing things we see everyday. The texture of a wall we pass each morning. The sound a particular door makes. The expression on the face of a loved one when they don't know we're watching. Familiarity, it turns out, is a kind of blindness.

The camera broke that efficiency for me. When you're shooting, you cannot afford to be efficient in this way. You have to stay with the question: what is actually here? Not what you expected to find, not what you remember from last time but what is here, now, in this light, at this particular hour? It is an act of sustained attention, and like any practice, the more you do it, the more natural it becomes.

What I didn't anticipate was that it would bleed out of my photography practice and into the rest of life.

 I started noticing things I had no camera for. The way the light moved across the kitchen at seven in the morning, throwing a stripe of gold across the table that was gone by eight. The exact colour of Oxford stone in those first low rays – that deep, saturated amber that the stone holds for a few minutes before the light climbs and everything flattens back to pale. The way a canal looks at dawn, the surface almost still, the reflection of the trees burning orange and copper when the sun first finds it. None of these things are ‘remarkable’ and that is precisely the point.

Beauty, I have come to believe, is not rare. It is not reserved for famous landscapes or the kind of scenery that earns thousands of likes. It is embarrassingly abundant. It exists on the surfaces of ordinary things, in the quality of light on a Tuesday, in the weight of a familiar mug held in both hands, the sound of a pen moving across paper.

 It exists whether or not anyone stops to see it. Most of the time, no one does.

The golden hour passes whether we witness it or not. That is something I find myself thinking about often. There is so much happening at the edges of ordinary days that asks for nothing from us. No response, no action. Just the small acknowledgment of being present when it occurs.

I keep a journal partly for this reason. Not only to record events or plan the weeks ahead – though it does both – but to hold onto the things I don't want the brain to file away and lose. The stripe of morning gold across the table. The amber stone. The burning canal. Writing something down, much like taking a photograph, is its own form of noticing; a second look at something you might otherwise have only half-seen.

There is a feedback loop between attention and beauty. The more carefully you look, the more there is to see. The world does not become more beautiful. Your capacity for it does. 

I learned this from a camera and an early alarm. But the camera was always incidental. The real thing it gave me was a reason to look slowly, and with some care at what was already there.

This morning it turned everything gold.

BY KALUM CARTER