importance to painters, photographers, and anyone else who creates those images. The knowledge,” which includes, among other things, knowing that eyes and lips tell a great deal about other people’s moods and attitudes. premise of this book is that the way you compose A second type of looking is task-relevant a photograph will influence the way in which looking, in which the viewer sets out to look for someone else looks at it. While this is tacitly something or gain specific information from accepted throughout the visual arts, pinpointing an image or scene. In looking at a photograph, the how and the why of visual attention has been we can assume that the viewer is doing this hampered by lack of information. Traditionally, by choice, and probably for some kind of art and photography critics have used their pleasure or entertainment (or in the hope that own experience and empathy to divine what the photograph will deliver this). This is an a viewer might or should get out of a picture, important starting condition. Next come the but it is only in the last few decades that this viewer’s expectations. For instance, if he or has been researched. Eye-tracking provides the she sees at first glance that there is something experimental evidence for how people look at unusual or unexplained about the image, this is a scene or an image, and the groundbreaking likely to cause a gaze pattern that is searching for study was by A. L. Yarbus in 1967. In looking information that will explain the circumstances. at any scene or image, the eye scans it in fast The classic study was by Yarbus in 1967, in which jumps, moving from one point of interest to a picture of a visitor arriving in a living room another. These movements of both eyes together was shown first without any instructions, and are known as saccades. One reason for them then with six different prior questions, including ).4%.$%$ /2$%2 is that only the central part of the retina, the estimating the ages of the people in the image. )N THIS PHOTOGRAPH OF A HOLDING TENT AT A 2ED #ROSS fovea, has high resolution, and a succession of The very different scanpaths showed how the HOSPITAL FOR COMBAT INJURIES IN THE 3UDAN CIVIL WAR saccades allows the brain to assemble a total view task influenced the looking. ) WANTED TO SHOW TWO THINGS MORE OR LESS EQUALLY in the short-term memory. The eye’s saccadic Other research in this area shows that most /NE WAS THE INJURED SOLDIER AN AMPUTEE AND movements can be tracked, and the so-called people tend to agree on what are the most THE OTHER WAS THE RICH HISTORY OF GRAFFITI THAT HAD “scanpath” recorded. If then superimposed on informative parts of a picture, but that this is always ACCUMULATED OVER TIME 4HIS GRAFFITI CONTAINED ONE OBVIOUS SLOGAN THAT REMOVES THE NEED FOR A CAPTION the view—such as a photograph—it shows how tempered by individual experience (personal stored AND DRAWINGS OF ANIMALS IN PARTICULAR CATTLE MANY and in what order a viewer scanned the image. knowledge makes scanpaths idiosyncratic). Also, OF THE PATIENTS HAD BEEN FROM CATTLE
REARING ETHNIC All of this happens so quickly (saccades last most painters and photographers believe that they GROUPS AND RECALLED CAVE PAINTINGS !LTHOUGH THE between 20 and 200 milliseconds) that most can in some way control the way that other people WAY IN WHICH THE PHOTOGRAPH WOULD BE VIEWED WAS people are unaware of their pattern of looking. view their work (this is, after all, the entire theme of NOT MAPPED OUT WITH ANY PRECISION ) IDENTIFIED THE KEY ELEMENTS IN MY ORDER OF INTENTION OUTLINED Research, however, shows that there are different this book), and research backs this up, in particular AND NUMBERED IN THE UPPER ILLUSTRATION &ROM THIS types of looking, depending on what the viewer an experiment (Hansen & Støvring, 1988) in ) HAD AN APPROXIMATE INTENDED ORDER OF VIEWING AS expects to get from the experience. There is which an artist explained how he intended viewers INDICATED BY THE ARROWS ON THE LOWER ILLUSTRATION spontaneous looking, in which the viewer is “just to look at the work and subsequent eye-tracking THIS ADMITTEDLY RECONSTRUCTED FOR THE PURPOSES OF looking,” without any particular thing in mind. proved him largely correct. Another experiment THIS PAGE The gaze pattern is influenced by such factors as with interesting potential is that the scanpath that novelty, complexity, and incongruity. In the case emerges at first viewing occupies about 30% of the of a photograph, the eye is attracted to things viewing time, and that most viewers then repeat that are of interest and to parts of the picture that it—re-scanning the same way rather than using contain information useful for making sense out the time to explore other parts of the picture. In of it. Visual weight, as we saw on the previous other words, most people decide quite quickly pages, plays an important role; this is because what they think is important and/or interesting spontaneous looking is also influenced by “stored in an image, and go on looking at those parts.