© Benoit Allouis, from "Blind Spots"

The synopsis by Benoit Allouis accompanying the Blind Spots project offers several points of departure for a reflection on the phenomenology of the gaze, as it begins with a fundamental contradiction: seeing is not the same as perceiving, and perceiving is not the same as knowing.

The gaze, in other words, is not a neutral window onto the world. We must therefore begin by recognizing the distinction between the visual field and the visible world. We do not simply see what lies before us. We see from a position, from within a body, from a particular orientation, and through the lens of a perceptual history. The fact that the brain automatically “fills in” the blind spot (the so-called anatomical blind spot, which gives the series its title) is particularly significant: perception does not present us with an incomplete world; it directly produces an apparently continuous one, concealing its own gaps. From this perspective, the blind spot is not merely what we fail to see; it is also what we do not know we fail to see.

© Benoit Allouis, from "Blind Spots"

© Benoit Allouis, from "Blind Spots"

Here, the reference to Maurice Merleau-Ponty is particularly productive. In Phenomenology of Perception, perception is not the act of an abstract subject observing an external object, but rather an embodied relationship between body and world. This helps us read Allouis’s “confession” — “I thought I knew these cities – but I only knew my neighborhoods” — more attentively. The problem is not simply that the photographer possessed insufficient information about New York and Paris. His perceptual body itself was situated within particular portions of the city.

© Benoit Allouis, from "Blind Spots"

The city we know is therefore also the city we move through. A neighborhood is not merely a place the photographer has chosen to photograph; it is the everyday horizon, the landscape of signs within which his gaze has been formed. And, naturally, every choice of where to look precludes other possibilities that do not belong to that immediate relationship, but might enter it in the future. Allouis suggests, between the lines, that a project is also an opportunity: an attempt to move the body before moving the camera.

© Benoit Allouis, from "Blind Spots"

© Benoit Allouis, from "Blind Spots"

© Benoit Allouis, from "Blind Spots"

The blind spot, beyond raising a question of perception, also places an emphasis on attention. Or rather: the outskirts of Paris or New York’s Outer Boroughs, like the peripheral areas of so many other cities, are not literally invisible. They are visible, traversable, photographable. And yet they can be imageless: lacking a shared, recognizable, culturally sedimented image. One of the implicit assumptions of documentary photography is that to photograph means to select something from the field of the visible, and therefore to affirm: “This deserves to be looked at.” It is precisely here that the phenomenology of the gaze meets the politics of representation.

© Benoit Allouis, from "Blind Spots"

Allouis’s question, “What deserves to be photographed?”, is therefore a crucial one. There is, in fact, no completely neutral photographic field. Not even the computational field of Street View is neutral: it depends on a specific camera height, a particular route, a certain degree of accessibility and, consequently, on a specific mode of perceiving the urbs from the road.

Certain places possess a culturally constructed photogenicity: monuments, skylines, emblematic architectures, sites of power, neighborhoods recognized as “typical.” They have been photographed so many times that their image precedes the photograph itself. This is the familiar sensation of having already seen them, of possessing a mental repertoire of them, almost as if we already owned them. It is this sensation that often drives people to seek the click that ultimately fails to satisfy because it is not what we expected, not how the place was supposed to look. In such cases, we might speak of tautological photography: photographing what has already been recognized as photographable. It is an experience on which much of tourism is based.

© Benoit Allouis, from "Blind Spots"

Allouis’s project, however, like much photography that preceded it, confronts this absence of representation and takes up a position of “marginality.” The outskirts, by definition, provide fertile ground for such an approach. Photography thus also becomes an expression of a political concept, as it has been, in particular, for certain avant-garde movements; I am thinking, for example, of practitioners of Visual Poetry.

Allouis also raises another question: “And from what distance?” Distance is not merely an optical or compositional matter. It is also an ethical distance. From what distance can I look at a place that does not belong to me? Or how close should I get to a subject I do not know without turning photography into an act of appropriation or into a false claim to knowledge?

© Benoit Allouis, from "Blind Spots"

This also opens up epistemological considerations. Perhaps one of the most interesting aspects of Blind Spots is that, through its anatomical metaphor, it questions the very possibility of completely overcoming one’s blind spot — that is, the intrinsic partiality of the gaze, since it is structural to the visual apparatus rather than accidental. To photographically thematize this biological, and therefore perceptual, deficiency reveals the limits of the photographic act, as well as the fact that knowledge cannot be constructed through a single gaze, but rather through a plurality of gazes. 

© Benoit Allouis, from "Blind Spots"

Let us return to the word “imagelessness.” It does not simply mean “without images.” A peripheral area can be full of local images, including private photographs made by its inhabitants. And yet it can remain imageless, or rather silenced, because it is excluded from the media regime — advertising, tourism, publishing, art, and so on. The blind spot, therefore, does not reside only in the retina of the observer, but also within the decision-making network that determines which portions of the field deserve to become images and therefore to be seen and photographed. Constructing a cultural image of a place is, consequently, a delicate operation in the hands of power.

This is why projects such as Allouis’s, beyond their compositional exercise, remind us of the urgency of putting other images into circulation, disrupting pre-established visual fields, and unsettling the gaze through alternative points of view that disorient common perception and draw other cognitive maps. This also recalls, to some extent, psychogeography as a practice of abandoning preconceived images of places and predetermined interpretive categories in order to expose oneself to other spaces and other, less familiar vocabularies. It is not necessarily about seeing new places, but about seeing them differently — or about reaching a point where we do not know how to look at them because we lack the categories through which to interpret them, and what I have long called the scopic dictionary, which I hope may one day find a place on the shelves of public libraries alongside more traditional linguistic dictionaries.

© Benoit Allouis, from "Blind Spots"

Photography as a practice of contradiction, rather than the tautological execution of an established repertoire. Phenomenology tells us that every gaze is situated, selective, and incomplete; photography can make its partiality perceptible. The blind spot moves from the retina to the body, from the body to the city, from the city to visual culture: what begins as a physiological gap becomes a metaphor for knowledge and, ultimately, a political question. And perhaps the question becomes: “What needs to happen for something to become visible to us?” It is in attempting to answer this question that we begin to engage with a phenomenology of visibility.

Benoit Allouis (website)