Wondering why it can be seen only one of the basement textures of the reflection or the reflection image itself at once, I often photograph such scenes as a mixture of the basement texture and the reflection image.

I found that such a case is called “Inattentional blindness” in The Mind is Flat: The Illusion of Mental Depth and The Improvised Mind written by Nick Chapter in 2019. I read it in Japanese, and there are more topics about vision than I expected. The description about inattentional blindness is in Chapter 8.

Though I will touch on the topic only about “Inattentional blindness” here, in this book the story is developed from the characteristics of the brain as it can treat only one thing at once to the flatness of the mind through many experimental results.

To return to “Inattentional blindness”, when I was a beginning student of photography, I was often disappointed to find something that I hadn’t intended to photograph in developed films. Because I had seen only what I wanted to see.

Nowadays, such cases are less, but sometimes I can’t be aware that my mobile phone or camera is reflected on the window for some time, when I take photographs of the city below from the airplane. At all such times, I remember that “I see only what I want to see.” and laugh bitterly.

Since my postgraduate student, the theme in my creation is that I think about how we see, focusing on the difference between vision of man and vision of camera.

Now I see that cameras have taught me about “Inattentional blindness” from just the beginning, but I couldn’t be aware of it.