Laws of Seeing

The Laws of Seeing was an explanatory book about gestalt and visual comprehension. The book explored the way that we rationalize images in our heads using gestalt principles like proximity, similarity, and so on. Through many diagrams and supplemental images Metzger explained visual discrepancies and the reasoning behind them. There are actual forms and implied forms, the latter being what we “see”. Our perception of what we see, or percept, is determined by gestalt principles. The topics that I found most interesting in the reading were camouflage, visual agnosia, and color change as boundary.

Camouflage is not a new concept to me, but I have never considered the reasoning behind it. I have always wondered why an animal with lighter belly fur would have an advantage, seeing as how white is not a common forest color. I originally thought that an animal with a lighter stomach would be easier to see, and that an animal with minimal amounts of color change would be easier to hide. After reading the text I found that the opposite was true, and once explained it completely makes sense. Animals like dogs that keep their backs facing the sky and their bellies facing downward tend to have lighter coloring on their undersides. This is because the light source above them illuminates their fur, making the dark parts look lighter. Their lighter undersides, which are naturally shaded, are then a visual match for their illuminated backs. Animals with a uniform color have less camouflage because there are no visual effects to hide the shadows they cast. Humans do not have countershaded hides because we are mammals that change position often, and do not have a side that typically faces the sun.

When learning how to read English as a child, I experienced visual agnosia. At the time, I was not sure what was happening and thought that it was a phenomenon that I alone was experiencing. Reading aloud in class was especially difficult for me, because when I got nervous the words on the page would dance around and become illegible, and I would be forced to guess what they were. Most of the words we read are discernible because of the laws of proximity and similarity, so once I became a more confident reader I relied more on the word lengths and spacing to identify them. There are still moments now that I experience mild visual agnosia, usually when I am giving a presentation. My mind goes blank and words seem illegible because my fear soaked brain is abandoning the gestalt principles that allow people to read and comprehend. I also related to an example about visual misrepresentation, which is extremely common when reproducing images. A study was done in which a subject was asked to reproduce an image made up of squares. The squares were copied almost perfectly, but the intermediate spaces between them were incorrect. In this case, the brain recognized the squares immediately, and was able to recreate them easily. What the brain did not see was the equally important space surrounding the squares. To overcome the inability to see intermediate spaces, I had a teacher who made me draw only the negative spaces surrounding an object. Surprisingly, my ability to render scenes improved. Putting focus on only one part of an image is not conducive to recreating scenes from life, because everything in a scene is contributing visually. Things that we may not notice immediately (eyebrows, for example) would be extremely noticeable if left out.

Color change as boundary is a concept that I continuously struggled with when learning how to draw. I could not understand why none of my line drawings looked realistic, and it was only after several life drawing classes that I discovered that relying more on shading would produce a more realistic image. There are no boundary lines in real organic shapes, but people add them in when trying to signal a boundary or color change. I think that a lot of this is due to the fact that drawings are typically attempting to record a color scene in black and white. I have noticed that a lot of animated movies will make their animated outlines a lighter color, making the images more visually pleasing. Darker comic styles still use black as an outline, even with colored images, and the effect is rather jarring.

I noticed a lot of the concepts from Gilchrist’s Seeing Black and White in Metzger’s writing. Both authors covered perception and gestalt in their books, outlining the principles and laws of seeing. Metzger’s explanations for illumination and contrast were much easier to understand, probably because of his simplified word choice and large amount of visual aids. I feel as though my understanding of gestalt increased after reading Metzger’s work whereas Gilchrist’s work confused me.