Passim Perception

One time years ago I was hiking in Majorca and I saw this huge cliff with cypress trees jutting out of the face of it. I pulled out my camera to take a photo, and it didn’t even come close to capturing the scene. My vision seemed to exaggerate certain aspects of what I was looking at.

This observation really illuminated the idea that the camera and I were processing the spatial landscape differently. Specifically— opposed to the camera lens that seems to collapse space into a flat organizational structure, the eye/mind seem to pull certain points forward, enlarging and sharpening them. Passim, translates from latin to mean “everywhere”. There seems to be a constellation of focal and peripheral points emerging simultaneously in the scene. And contrary to what linear perspective proposes, the most geographically distant components of a scene aren’t always shrinking. Sometimes they appear to be growing and pushing past more localized ones.