In January of this year I took two photographs of the same subject: a man and a woman seated side by side on a public bench. I made the first image (Figure 1, above) by holding my camera inconspicuously at hip height and by firing the shutter mid-stride as I passed by. I checked the photo at the end of the street and disagreed with the composition. I had imagined a tableau bracketed and balanced by some of the scene’s environmental fixtures—e.g., the posts, railings, and horizon. So, I circled back and took another photograph, this time preferring to compose my shot deliberately (Figure 2, below). I stood still, peered through the camera’s viewfinder, and framed a more orderly tableau, one that was loyal to the concept of a photo I had previsualized and hoped for. It was only after getting home that I realized how much more affecting the original photo was.
Figure 2. Photo by Levi Shiach.
Consider the two images. In the first—the found frame—the bench’s slats cut obliquely through the scene; the camera’s cant allows the bench’s iron scrollwork to intrude into the frame and interrupt any easy symmetry; moreover, the camera’s cant excludes the offing from view with its sun, ocean and sky. Nothing is centred; nothing is monumental. The sun as a prominent environmental subject is only implied by the scene’s slanted windows of light. What is given prominence instead, then, is a set of relations: the lean of a lapsed body into another; the X of the bench’s undercarriage set against the running lines of the bench’s slats and the railing’s poles; long winter shadows drawing shapes through the sunlight across the concrete and sand. Crucially, the head-on-shoulder feels less staged than encountered.
By contrast, the second image—the composed frame—reads as a textbook “couple-at-sunset” tableau: its centred subjects, rectilinear supports, level horizon, and brilliant sunset all work together to produce a legible but generic grammar. Of course, nothing is wrong with this image—it is competently made—but the very success of its arrangement forecloses the possibility of a real encounter with it.
Discovery, not rigidity, is what gives a given work its life.Taken together, this pair of photographs implies something about the nature of imagination: whatever else it may be, it is not simply a tool for fabricating or fantasizing—at least, not insofar as it is implicated in the creative process—for if it were, we might expect fidelity to a previsualized plan to correlate reliably with artistic strength, both here and across the arts; and yet, it does not, and indeed, often enough the opposite is true: discovery, not rigidity, is what gives a given work its life.
For present purposes, then, it will suffice to treat imagination as a discipline of receptivity: a trained capacity to let what is already there come into view in new—and more truthful—ways. A photographic metaphor is apt: imagination functions like an aperture, regulating how much of the world we admit into our seeing. In this way, the imagination functions as a mechanism through which we come to know and understand the world: it helps us receive not just information about the world but the world itself, and it makes us capacious and attentive recipients. As opposed to manufacturing fantasies that it imposes onto reality, then, we might say that the imagination enlarges and refines our capacity to receive reality as it is. The stronger of my two photographs is not the one whose outcome I controlled but the one whose outcome I relinquished control over long enough for the world to articulate itself.
Of course, this relinquishment of control should not be mistaken for an abdication of craft. In the case of a photographic practice, focus, exposure, timing, and compositional judgment all matter; they are the technical choices that allow the scene—not the scheme—to speak. The distinction, then, is this: good, imaginative control keeps the frame quiet so that the scene can speak; bad, unimaginative control speaks over the scene. Kierkegaard suggests that the point of prayer is not to bend God toward us but to bend us toward God—to alter the will and life of the one who prays, that is.1 We might say that the imagination serves a similar role in the capacity of acquiring knowledge and understanding about the world: instead of manipulating and shrinking reality, it widens the knower. It dilates the aperture of our attention and prepares us to receive the world as it is.2 On this account, an imaginative way of knowing does not consist in projecting schemes onto reality but in becoming the sort of seer whose seeing is revised and refined by reality. That is why my “found” photograph “knows” more than my “composed” one: not because the world changed, but because, for a moment, I did.
Good, imaginative control keeps the frame quiet so that the scene can speak; bad, unimaginative control speaks over the scene.If my “found” photograph is somehow able to let the world speak, it is worth asking who or what enables that speech to be heard. Viewed theologically, imaginative receptivity is able to grow out of a mere aesthetic technique into a posture of hospitality towards the Spirit. In John 3:8 we’re told that “The wind blows where it wishes [within those who are] born of the Spirit,” and in Exodus 31:1-6, Bezalel and Oholiab are said to be “filled ... with the Spirit of God” for the purpose of “[devising] artistic designs.” Our goal, then, as artists made in the image of the Perfect Artist, is to make room for the Spirit—to quiet ourselves enough for the Wind’s rustle to be audible. Here we see how our imaginative aperture is meant to function as a bidirectional passageway: for the world to pass into us, and for the Spirit to pour into the world. Put another way, the imagination receives and gives reciprocally: it receives the world’s givenness and, at the same time, it becomes a threshold through which the Spirit can mediate back into the world. Knowing, then, consists in a kind of giving and receiving. We let the givenness of the world enter into us and revise us, and we answer with clarified attention so that what is real and true may appear more exact in our sight.
And, in addition to reorienting the way we come to know a world full of objects and things, this posture reorients the way we come to know a world full of people, too. A receptive imagination treats the Other not as a projection of oneself, but as a totally unique, self-disclosing agent. When I approach a person the same way I approached making the second, composed photograph—without a real receptivity or curiosity—I end up flattening the person into a predictable and unreal image of themselves. However, when I approach a person the same way I approached making the first photo—with a readiness to receive whatever is real and true—the things that make that person irreducibly themselves begin to appear. By exercising a receptive imagination, we are forced to ask: am I meeting you as a living agent with edges that resist me, or as a screen for my preconceived projections about you? The imagination, disciplined towards receptivity, helps us choose the former. And, by corollary, it helps us choose love, at least insofar as love is, as Iris Murdoch puts it, “the extremely difficult realization that something other than oneself is real.”3 Understood in this way, a receptive imagination is not incidental to love but instrumental to it. It widens the knower so that the known can come into focus on its own terms. Indeed, what I am proposing is that by exercising a receptive imagination, we make things—and, importantly, people—less imaginary and more real.
And in the same way that the Spirit is able to mediate itself through our widening imagination in the creative act, here, in relationships too, our imagination acts as a vessel for the Spirit’s intervention. By widening our imaginative apertures, we become conduits of patience, gentleness, and kindness. In fact, we might say that the fruits of the Spirit are transformed by such an imagination from mere moral imperatives into epistemic virtues—habits of attention that enable us to perceive justly and lovingly. An imaginative sight, then, is a generous and compassionate sight. It allows the Other to disclose themselves as they are, and it allows this disclosure to revise us.
Returning, finally, to the pair of photographs. The first photograph feels received whereas the second photograph feels—quite literally, I suppose—taken. This difference points to imagination’s task as I have attempted to describe it: to receive, not invent. And, indeed, a receptive imagination helps us to know and understand the world by changing the kind of attention we pay to it. In our best making—and in our best meeting, too—we are called to cultivate a posture of attentiveness to whatever is before us. When I tighten my grip, the field of meaning in the world narrows; when I make room for the Spirit to pass through me, however, more of what is knowable in the world becomes legible to me.
