See in in a different light

‘Seeing a person in a different light’, as they say. It’s a cliché, a figure of speech. Then there are moments when, all of a sudden, clichés – tired, worn-out, devoid of surprise – become an obvious fact: something that really happens before your very eyes, in that moment, and there’s no other way to explain it. That must be how it was the first time someone said it. I thought about this yesterday morning when I saw the portrait of Jannik Sinner on the front page of this newspaper. For a fraction of a second, I didn’t even recognise him. I mean: I thought, ‘It looks like him, is it him?’ I had to look more closely. This is because that photo is, in fact, a portrait; it looks like a painting, and the man who took it is a master of light: Paolo Roversi, a poet of photography. We all saw Sinner in a different light yesterday. A person so different from the one we have in mind, from the images that come at us from all sides, unsolicited, clouding our vision and homogenising our perspective. So here’s the thing: in an age when anyone can become a photographer – taking pictures of dishes in restaurants, of themselves in the mirror, millions of selfies, images of sunsets, ferry wakes, cocktails with little flags – suddenly the difference between looking and seeing becomes clear. Looking, if you have the gift of sight, is inevitable. Seeing requires awareness, thought, courage: to see is to understand. There is an essay by John Berger, ‘Understanding a Photograph’, which is a marvellous read. Berger wonders what remains of the images we glance at distractedly and superficially – an immense number of images per minute, on our screens – and what remains, by contrast, when we see and understand something we did not know before. From that book, I remember an early 20th-century image of three men in hats and with walking sticks looking at the camera. A photograph by August Sander. How many men in hats have I seen? Millions, but those three never leave my mind. So too with Sinner, in Roversi’s portrait. What is a photograph, when it reveals a whole world?