The power of perspective cannot be overstated. How we see what we look at makes all the difference. And how we see when we look at our seeing–at what we see and how we evaluate it, so that we evaluate our evaluations–is the most important place to examine our perspective regarding how we are seeing what we look at.
No one sees independently of all we have seen up to now. What we see tends to depend on what we have seen, and is validated by how we have seen what we have seen. It is not often that what we see here, now invalidates or calls into question how we have seen what we have seen in the past. We tend to see today how we saw yesterday, so we are seeing the same things in the same ways all our life. This is like have, say, one day of experience repeated every day from that day forward. This is particularly so if where we are living does not change over time. We see everything as we have always seen it and do not grow one bit in our ability to evaluate our seeing over time. So that having fifty years of experience is not at all the same as having one year of experience repeated fifty times–which is the way it is in so many places around the world.
Where do we learn to question what we assume to be so? What we take for granted? What we believe to be the case? When do we ever see differently? How can we be sure that we are seeing at all? Or 1 tenth of what is available to be seen? Particularly if we label what we look at the same way over time we never develop our capacity to see the people and things that are with us. That being the case, there is no way that the world we live in could ever be much different-in-a-good-way than it is.
Jim Dollar's Photography and Philosophy 