Photography and the Visual Brain

Photography has the aim to provide knowledge about the world we live in seizing from the continually changing information one unique moment which expresses the reality (of the artist). Also the brain must discount a great deal of the information which is not essential to its aim of representing the true character of objects. OBJECTIVE: This essay describes the pathways of the brain preceding a camera shot, from the external sensory stimulus, to the elaboration in the neocortex, and finally to the response in the motor action represented by the “click”. The focus is on the visual brain; we will see how it is characterized by a set of parallel processing of perceptual stimuli as well as temporal hierarchical awareness of perception. We will also briefly describe how the elaboration of the external stimulus is transferred into motor action, which in the case of photography is able to capture the essential feature of a specific reality in a fraction of a second.