Depth of Field

The Weight of Light

Chapter 9: Depth of Field

Anil Deshpande sat in the back row of Room 214 with a yellow legal pad on his knee and a pen he did not use, because what Elena was doing could not be captured in notes, could not be reduced to the administrative language of classroom observations and teaching evaluations, could not be filed in the forms that the Visual Arts department required of its faculty reviewers, the forms with their checkboxes and their Likert scales and their comment fields that asked whether the instructor "demonstrates mastery of subject matter" and "engages students effectively" and "creates an inclusive learning environment," as though teaching were a list of competencies that could be individually assessed and aggregated into a score, a number, a quantifiable measure of the unquantifiable act of standing in front of a room and changing how people see.

He had been watching Elena teach for three semesters now. He had hired her himself, had advocated for her to the dean and to the provost and to the human resources department, which had concerns about accommodation and liability and the particular bureaucratic anxieties that attend the employment of a person with a disability in a role that seems to require the absent faculty, the way hiring a deaf musician or a paralyzed dancer would raise concerns, not because the institution doubts the person but because the institution cannot imagine the adaptation, cannot see past its own assumptions about what a body must be able to do in order to perform a role, and Anil had argued, had presented Elena's portfolio and her teaching statement and her resume -- Reuters, Associated Press, Time, the International Center of Photography, Sarajevo, Kabul, Beirut, Aleppo, twenty years of work that spoke not in the language of accommodation but in the language of accomplishment -- and the institution had relented, had hired her on a one-year contract, renewable, conditional, provisional, all the words that mean we will let you try but we are watching, we are always watching, and Anil had accepted the conditions because the alternative was not hiring Elena, and not hiring Elena would have been a loss that the department could not afford, a loss of credibility and expertise and the particular quality of teaching that only a person who has lived fully inside an art and then been exiled from it can provide.

Elena was talking about depth of field.

"Depth of field," she said, "is the zone of acceptable sharpness in a photograph. It is the distance between the nearest object in focus and the farthest object in focus. And it is controlled by three things: the aperture of the lens, the focal length of the lens, and the distance between the camera and the subject. These three variables interact in predictable, mathematical ways, and you will learn the math, but the math is not the lesson. The lesson is the choice."

She stood at the side of the desk, her hand on its edge, and Anil could see from the back of the room that the students were leaning forward, that they had adopted the posture of engagement that he recognized from the best teachers he had observed in thirty years of academic life, the posture that is not taught but is earned, the posture that a room gives to a speaker who has demonstrated, over the course of weeks, that every word is selected, that every pause is intentional, that the time the speaker asks for will be repaid in understanding.

"When you open the aperture wide -- f/1.4, f/2, f/2.8 -- the depth of field is narrow. Very narrow. At f/1.4, the zone of sharpness may be only a few inches deep. Everything in front of that zone and everything behind it will be out of focus. It will be blurred. It will be present in the photograph but not sharp, not clear, not defined. It will be a suggestion, an impression, a smear of color and light that the eye registers but does not read, that the eye passes over on its way to the thing that is in focus, the thing that is sharp, the thing that the photographer has chosen to make visible."

She paused.

"When you close the aperture down -- f/16, f/22 -- the depth of field is deep. Everything is in focus. The foreground, the middle ground, the background. Every surface, every detail, every object in the frame is sharp, is clear, is legible. Nothing is prioritized. Nothing is subordinated. The photograph becomes a democracy of detail, every element given equal emphasis, every surface rendered with equal precision."

She moved behind the desk now, her hand trailing along it, and she stood centered, facing the room.

"These are two extremes. And they produce two radically different kinds of photographs. The shallow depth of field photograph says: look here. Look at this one thing. This is what matters. Everything else is secondary, is background, is blur. The deep depth of field photograph says: look everywhere. Everything matters. Every detail is relevant. The world is composed of surfaces and all of them are worth seeing."

She took a breath.

"And here is the lesson. Here is the thing that is not in your textbook and not in the YouTube tutorials and not in the camera's instruction manual. The choice of depth of field is not a technical decision. It is a philosophical one. It is a decision about what matters. When you open the aperture and narrow the depth of field, you are saying: I know what is important in this scene, and I am going to show you, and I am going to blur everything else, and the blurring is not a failure of the lens, it is a statement of the photographer, it is the photographer saying: I have looked at this scene and I have decided that this -- this face, this hand, this teacup, this single object in this single moment -- is the thing that matters, and I am willing to sacrifice the rest of the scene to make you see it."

She let the silence work.

"And when you close the aperture and deepen the depth of field, you are saying the opposite. You are saying: I do not know what is important. Or: everything is important. Or: I refuse to choose. And the refusal to choose is itself a choice, and it is a powerful choice, and it is the choice that Ansel Adams made when he photographed the American West at f/64, everything in focus from the foreground wildflowers to the distant mountains, every rock and tree and cloud and shadow rendered with the same democratic precision, because Adams believed that the landscape was a whole, was a system, was an ecology of surfaces and distances that could not be separated into foreground and background without being diminished, and his choice to keep everything in focus was a statement about the interconnectedness of things, about the refusal to subordinate one part of the world to another."

Anil wrote on his legal pad: She teaches philosophy through optics. He underlined it. He had been an artist himself, once, a painter, an abstract expressionist who had given up the practice for the administration of practice, who had traded the studio for the department, the brush for the budget, and he recognized in Elena the quality that he had once had and had surrendered -- the quality of a person who does not separate the technical from the meaningful, who sees in the mechanics of the medium the engine of the message, who understands that a lens aperture is not just a number but a commitment, a position, a declaration of what matters.

"Let me give you an example," Elena said. "Let me give you two examples. Two photographs of the same subject, made with different depths of field, and let me describe the difference."

She stood still. She composed herself. She was accessing the archive again, the vast internal library of images she had made and studied and memorized over twenty years, the library that blindness could not reach, could not delete, could not corrupt, the library that existed in her body, in her nervous system, in whatever region of the brain stores not just the content of images but the feeling of making them, the muscular memory of the camera in the hands and the eye at the viewfinder and the finger on the shutter release.

"A woman in a market in Beirut," she said. "I made two photographs. The first at f/2. The woman is in focus. Her face, her hands, the vegetables she is holding -- all sharp. Behind her, the market is a blur of color. Other stalls, other people, the awnings, the signs -- all out of focus, all reduced to shapes and colors and impressions. The woman is isolated. She is the subject. She is the only sharp thing in the frame, and your eye goes to her because your eye always goes to the sharp thing, the in-focus thing, the way your ear goes to the clearest voice in a crowded room."

She paused.

"The second photograph. Same woman. Same market. F/16. Everything in focus. The woman, the vegetables, the stall behind her, the stalls on either side, the people walking past, the awnings, the signs in Arabic, the sky above the market, the buildings behind the market. Everything sharp. Everything present. And in this photograph, the woman is not the subject. The market is the subject. The woman is a part of the market, a detail in the larger scene, one element among many, and your eye does not go to her first, your eye wanders, explores, discovers, because there is no hierarchy of sharpness to guide it, there is no blur to say look here, not there, and the photograph becomes an exploration rather than a statement."

She straightened.

"Both photographs are true. Both show the woman in the market. But they say different things. The first says: this woman. The second says: this world. And the choice between them -- the choice of f/2 or f/16, the choice of shallow or deep, the choice of isolation or integration -- is the photographer's choice, is the photographer's statement about what matters, and it is a choice you must make consciously, deliberately, with full understanding of what you are saying, because every photograph is a sentence, and the depth of field is the grammar of that sentence, and if you do not control the grammar, the sentence will say something you did not mean."

She turned her head slightly, in the direction of Anil's seat in the back row. She did not see him but she knew he was there. She had heard him enter -- the door opening quietly, the careful footsteps of a man trying not to disrupt, the particular weight of his step that she had learned to distinguish from the students' lighter treads -- and she had identified him by the faint scent of the sandalwood soap he used, a scent she had noticed in their first meeting in his office and had filed away the way she filed away all sensory information now, as data, as evidence, as the texture of the world she navigated by inference and memory and the constant, vigilant attention that was the tax her blindness levied on every moment of her waking life.

She did not acknowledge his presence. She continued teaching.

"I want you to make two photographs for next class," she said. "The same subject. The same framing, as close as you can manage. One at your lens's widest aperture -- f/1.8, f/2.8, f/3.5, whatever your lens opens to. And one at f/16. Same subject, same frame, two depths of field. And when you bring them to class, I want you to describe both, and I want you to tell me which one says what you meant to say, and I want you to tell me which one says something you did not mean to say, because the one you did not mean is often the one that is true, and the truth in photography, as in life, is often the thing you did not intend, the thing that the medium revealed against your will, the thing that the light and the lens and the chemistry of the process extracted from the scene without your permission."

The class ended. The students left. Anil remained. Elena could hear him remaining, could hear the particular silence of a person who is waiting to speak, who is composing a thing to say and has not yet said it, and she stood behind the desk and she waited for him to speak because she knew who he was and she knew why he was there and she knew that the visit was not social, was not collegial, was not the casual drop-in of a department head who wanted to say good class, was something else, something with weight, something administrative, something that carried the particular gravity of institutional concern.

"Elena," Anil said. His voice was warm. It was always warm. It was the voice of a man who had spent thirty years mediating between artists and administrators, between the people who made things and the people who managed the making, and the warmth was genuine and it was also strategic, because warmth was the medium in which difficult conversations could be conducted without rupture, without the sharp edges that difficult conversations acquire when they are conducted in the cold.

"Anil," she said.

"That was a remarkable class."

"Thank you."

"The depth of field lecture. The market photographs. The Adams reference. It was -- I took notes. I never take notes at observations."

"But."

He was quiet for a moment. She had arrived at the word before he had, had heard the conjunction approaching in the shape of his silence, the way she heard approaching weather in the shift of air pressure, the way she heard approaching difficulty in the way a person breathed.

"The administration has questions," he said. "About the course. About -- how the assessments work. How you evaluate student work."

"I evaluate student work the way I have been evaluating it for three semesters. Students describe their photographs to me. I assess their verbal articulation of visual elements. I assess their technical understanding -- exposure, composition, focus, depth of field. I assess their growth across the term. My evaluations are rigorous and my students' outcomes are measurable and my course evaluations are consistently above the department average."

"I know. I have the numbers. The numbers are good."

"Then what are the questions?"

"The questions are -- and I want you to understand that these are not my questions, these are the provost's questions, relayed through the dean, relayed through me, and I disagree with the premise of the questions but I am obligated to relay them --"

"The questions are whether a blind person can grade photographs."

Anil was quiet. The quiet was confirmation.

"The questions are whether my assessments are valid," Elena said. "Whether a person who cannot see a photograph can determine whether the photograph is good. Whether the absence of visual verification compromises the integrity of the grade."

"Yes," Anil said. "That is the question. Stated less diplomatically than they stated it but yes, that is the substance."

Elena was still. She was very still. Kodak, under the desk, sensed the stillness and lifted his head, the way a dog lifts his head when the atmospheric pressure in the room changes, when the emotional weather shifts.

"Do you know what I saw in my last year of sight?" Elena said. "I saw Aleppo. I saw buildings that had been standing for centuries reduced to rubble. I saw children carrying bread through streets that were on fire. I saw a woman holding a dead child and the light on the woman's face was the most beautiful light I have ever seen, and the beauty of the light was an obscenity, and I photographed it, and the photograph was published on the front page of seven newspapers, and the photograph won an award, and the award meant nothing, and the photograph meant everything, and I cannot see it anymore. I cannot see any of it. But I know -- I know with the certainty of a person who has spent her life looking at images -- I know what makes a photograph work. I know what makes a photograph true. And the knowing does not live in my eyes. The knowing lives in my understanding, in my training, in the twenty years of practice that taught me to see not just with my eyes but with my entire body, my entire mind, my entire history of looking."

She stopped. She breathed.

"Tell the provost," she said, "that my students' work speaks for itself. Tell the provost that the photographs my students make are evaluated with more rigor than the photographs in any other section of this course, because my students must describe every element of their images, must articulate every choice, must defend every composition, and the articulation and the defense are themselves evidence of learning, are themselves proof that the students are seeing, are understanding, are growing. Tell the provost that a grade is not a visual assessment. A grade is an evaluation of learning. And I can evaluate learning. I have been evaluated by the most demanding editors and art directors in photojournalism, and I have met their standards, and I will meet the provost's standards, and if the provost's standards cannot be met by a blind woman who has seen more of the world than anyone in that building, then the standards are wrong."

Anil was quiet for a long time. The quiet had the quality of a man absorbing a speech he admired and feared, a speech that was true and that would not translate into the bureaucratic language that the administration required, a speech that was a photograph in words -- sharp, composed, exposed correctly, focused on the single thing that mattered, which was that Elena Vasquez could teach, could teach better than anyone in the department, could teach in a way that changed how people saw the world, and the fact that she could not see the world herself was not a deficit but an authority, an authority earned by loss, an authority that no sighted instructor could claim.

"I will tell them," Anil said. "I will relay your position. And I will advocate for you, as I have been advocating. But Elena -- they are forming a committee. A review committee. To evaluate the course. To observe classes. To assess student outcomes. I wanted you to know."

"A committee," Elena said.

"Yes."

"To evaluate whether a blind woman can teach photography."

"To evaluate the course's effectiveness. That is the language they are using."

"The language they are using is the language of people who do not want to say what they mean. What they mean is: can she do this. Can a blind woman do this. And the answer is yes, and the answer has been yes for three semesters, and the answer will continue to be yes, and if they need a committee to arrive at the answer that is already in front of them, then they need a committee, and I will teach as I have always taught, and the committee can sit in the back of the room and watch me the way you sat in the back of the room and watched me today, and they can take notes or not take notes and check their boxes or not check their boxes, and when they are done, they will know what you already know, which is that this course works, and it works because I work, and I work because I know what I am doing, and what I am doing is teaching people to see."

She gathered her things. She clipped Kodak's harness.

"Anil," she said, at the door. "Thank you for telling me. And thank you for the observation. Even if the observation is a prelude to an evaluation that should not be necessary."

"Elena," he said, and his voice was very quiet now, very warm, the voice of a man who cared about a colleague and who was constrained by the institution he served, the institution that paid his salary and defined his authority and that was now, in its slow, bureaucratic way, preparing to question the judgment he had exercised when he hired a blind photographer to teach the sighted to see. "Your class was extraordinary today. The depth of field lecture. It was -- I learned something. I have been in visual arts for thirty years and I learned something about seeing from a woman who cannot see, and that is not a contradiction, that is the point, and I will make sure they understand the point."

She nodded. She left. She walked out of the Cascade Building with Kodak leading and the white cane folded and the afternoon air cool on her face, and she walked across the campus toward the bus stop, and she thought about depth of field, about focus and blur, about the choice of what to make sharp and what to let dissolve into the soft, out-of-focus background of the uncritical, the unexamined, the unseen, and she thought that the administration was shooting her at f/1.4, was isolating her, was making her blindness the sharp thing, the thing in focus, the thing the eye goes to, and was letting everything else -- the teaching, the students, the work, the extraordinary daily fact of a woman who could not see teaching people to see -- blur into the background, and the blur was a choice, the blur was a statement, the blur was the institution saying: we see the blindness, we do not see the teacher, and Elena walked through the campus and she could not see the campus but she could feel it, could feel the trees and the buildings and the students passing and the light, the Portland light, the soft, overcast, democratic, unsympathetic, beautiful light, and she walked through it and she carried the weight of it and she did not blur.