Bob Aufuldish
Pareidolia
Pareidolia is the tendency to perceive an image hidden within another object, like seeing Jesus in a grilled cheese sandwich or Satan’s face within a cloud of smoke. It is, in short, seeing (compounded by the desire to see) what is not actually present. This series is the result of noticing what at first I thought was an accident. I was photographing through the window of a car, and when I looked at the resulting image my intended subject was lost amid a scrim of foliage, power lines, and clouds. I found this scrim of reflections—which created a kind of accidental Cubism—far more interesting than what I originally intended and began taking these sorts of pictures on purpose. What is especially fascinating is that what I see when I am taking the picture is not what the camera sees. There is something about the coating on the lens, the film on the glass of the car, and the algorithm that processes the image data that render reflections more vividly than can be seen with the naked eye. In a sense, the camera is seeing what is not actually present to my eyes—the camera is engaging in pareidolia. The history of photography is filled with examples of the camera extending the vision of humanity. I see this series as a further example of this tendency, albeit one that produces more abstract, and often poetic, results.
