The great playwright George Bernard Shaw tried hard to become a respected photographer. All but a few historians had forgotten this side of the turn-of-the-century’s most famous nonpolitical personality until Bernard Shaw On Photography was published in 1989. The book’s foreword calls him “as good a photographer as he was a motorist, and considerably less dangerous.”

Shaw was a feisty and contrary egotist with an opinion on everything. He believed photographs should replicate the world exactly as it is seen and that a photographer . could accomplish this goal by choice. By sheer force of fame and obsession, Shaw’s mediocre results were exhibited, published and placed in permanent collections.

As I thumbed through the pages of Bernard Shaw On Photography in a bookstore, his images took the first step toward success by creating an emotional response: I thought about the paper on which the images were printed and how much better off it had been as part of a living forest. Minutes later, however, I bought the book. My change of heart came when I realized its value as a document of the futility of trying to make photographs that exactly resemble reality. Others who have pursued this extreme simply haven’t gotten their efforts published.

Shaw said a “photographer is like the cod, which produces a million eggs in order that one may reach maturity.” With this attitude it’s hardly surprising that he grew frustrated by his own lack of results. He began lavishing praise on the work of his personal heroes, especially that of Frederick Evans, who had a dramatic method of preserving the integrity of nature photography. Shaw described with delight “how if the negative does not give him what he saw when he set up the camera, he smashes it.”

At a major gallery opening in London in 1900, Evans told the Royal Photographic Society, “Realism in the sense of true atmosphere, a feeling of space, truth of lighting, solidity and perfection of perspective (in the eye’s habit of seeing it) has been my ambitious aim; and to say that I have not achieved it but only hinted at it would be praise enough, considering the great difficulties in the way of a full achievement.”

It would be easy to criticize both Shaw and Evans for failing to follow their proclaimed ethics. Evans publicly’ hyped the pursuit of a perfect reality, yet privately told his peers that he never achieved it. Shaw could be pegged as either a loud-mouthed huckster or someone so visually challenged that he failed to notice the lack of realism Evans acknowledged. Before passing hasty judgment, however, we should consider that all the efforts of camera designers during the 20th century have yet to solve the problems Evans noted. Contemporary photography still fails to replicate what Evans called “the eye’s habit of seeing,” yet the public continues to believe that an image on a flat sheet of film directly copies reality unless the photographer has purposely worked to deceive us.

A more likely interpretation that may exonerate both Shaw and Evans comes from the cognitive sciences, which have been advancing even faster than computer sciences. The quirks that may have honestly led Shaw and Evans astray are still with us today because they are part of the biology rather than the technology of photography. Despite recent ads for a camera with a computer “that analyzes every subtlety of motion, light and distance…instantaneously to record precisely what you see,” the basic nature of a photograph remains unchanged from the day of its invention.

If computerized cameras could really deliver photographs of what we see with such precision, wouldn’t their instruction manuals use such enlightened imagery instead of handdrawn sketches to show us how to use them? The fact remains that we are biologically incapable of interpreting a photograph in the same way we would see the real world. In many situations simple drawings are less ambiguous and paradoxical.

Each of us builds a different visual interpretation in our brain as we view the same photograph. Our brains, unlike computers, thrive on incomplete information to shape the cognitive maps by which we interpret the world. Many cognitive scientists now believe that memory and consciousness originally evolved as tools to make visual systems perform better. Because photographs have been around for less than one hundredth of one percent of human evolution, it’s hardly surprising that our visual systems have not yet adapted to accurately perceive the information they record.

The unconscious inferences we make about the contents of a photograph are based on a myriad of stored assumptions in our minds. To make sense of an image, we subconsciously match “bottom-up” information beginning with the lines, colors and forms before our eyes with “top-down” information previously stored in our brains.

When we watch an artist draw a pencil sketch, we have a moment of recognition when the addition of a particular line makes the hidden likeness of a face pop out at us, no matter how incomplete the sketch may be. For the artist, the likeness was present from the very first mark.

A similar thing happens when two people view a landscape photograph. If one person has actually been to the place, his or her brain interprets the photograph with more top-down information. If the other has never been to the location, he or she builds up a less accurate mental image based on the reduced visual information he or she gets from the photograph without a direct, topdown perception of the actual scene. Thus our first real view of a place we’ve only seen in photos is always somewhat jarring until we reorient our visual inferences. “The pictures don’t do it justice” is a common cliché of world travelers, even if those images happen to have been made by some of the world’s best and most conscientious photographers. This is to be expected when a real scene doesn’t match the image we’ ve shaped in our minds.

When Shaw looked at Evans’ photographs, he built up unquestioned perceptions of reality based on his trust in his friend’s work. When he looked at his own results with his carefully honed self-critical ability, he came to the unmistakable conclusion that his photographs missed the mark. Evans, on the other hand, achieved a better balance between the pursuit of an honest impression of reality and that of his own personal vision.

The real question is, what did Evans have that Shaw lacked? The thought process of photography is not obvious or wholly intuitive. Over and over again, many of the best and brightest minds of each generation have floundered at the simple act of taking a meaningful photograph. There’s a reason why companies continue to pay high rates to those people who know how to operate these overthe-counter devices that are advertised as being able to do everything for us. It’s all in our heads, but not in all our heads.