Take a few minutes out of your life, go walk around, use your own two eyes, and look at how the world truly looks like, with all its perfection and all its flaws. Our brains and eyes work together and act in a similar way. Our brain can easily adapt to any situation it’s put in and that’s how life continues. It’s the same exact way our eyes work. One’s eyes just adapt to the overall look of a place, ignores the details, and saves that overall view of a place into memory. My eyes did the same exact thing to a place that I call home. My home affected me as a person in many ways. One major way my home affected me was making me see everything in a positive way.

A truly powerful thing that photographs can do is make what was invisible to the eye visible. For instance, while taking a picture next to my mailbox, because I wanted to show my friends how I was waiting for the new BTS album to come in, I noticed a few things in the photographs I took that my eyes just completely missed. First, the mailbox is bent, second, the mailbox looks weird because the only thing that’s holding it is a bunch of rocks around it to keep it from falling, Third, the location of the mailbox is very unphotographable because there’s a fence behind in and dead grass around it. After seeing those details in the photo, I could not unsee it with my two eyes. But why would I notice such things in a photograph but not in real life?. I got my answer from Barthes. Barthes was talking about how everyone sees pictures everywhere, with that he mentioned the process of getting those photos “Yet, among those which had been selected, evaluated, approved, collected in albums or magazines and which had thereby passed through the filter of culture, I realized that some provoked tiny jubilations, as if they referred to a stilled center, an erotic or lacerating value buried in myself (however harmless the subject may have appeared); and that others, on the contrary, were so indifferent to me by dint of seeing them multiply, like some weed, I felt a kind of aversion toward them, even of irritation”(1). The only reason I saw all those details and focused on them in the photo was because I wanted it to be the ideal picture that conveys my emotions and feeling of anticipation but at the same time look perfect and nice. That moment kind of made me think about why I had this idea that this house was perfect? That idea itself made me, for the rest of my life, see tons of things in this world in a positive way. And yet again, that “mind blown” moment came back again. It’s an example of the same situation because it came time for another picture. Because the album was actually delivered to my door, I wanted to take a picture next to the door which made me notice yet another thing. The entrance to my house has a step that matches the entrance of the house which is a reddish yellowish kind of color and is quite big. To enter the house one must go on the step to get in the house. I only noticed that in the photograph since I imagined having a whitish color behind my legs, which would look better in the photograph, but that’s not how it turned out because the step was there. I kind of had this thought that when anyone comes to my house, they would just automatically get the positive vibes that I’ve grown up with and then leave the house with a better state of mind on the world, at least, that’s what I thought because this house gave me those kinds of thoughts and feelings which reflected the way I saw the world but those two incidents made me realize how much my eyes are not necessarily showing me the full “truth”. Whether the photograph is for yourself, family, friends, memory, decoration, it always makes you look twice and look at the details because, for whatever reason, you want that photo to look the best way it could. So even though our eyes might trick us into not seeing these details or even things in general, photographs will definitely make our eyes look twice and see the truth behind everything.

“Punctum” could be seen through our own two eyes and not just through the camera lenses. Our eyes are used to seeing a place in a particle way because it sees it the first time, captures the overall view, and saves it into our memory and it even saves the feelings we had with this memories the same way I ignored everything imperfect in my house and saw it as perfect which is how I look at the world now. Therefore, when our eyes suddenly see the truth or a new detail, through photographs, or focusing too much, or trying to look for these details, or in any way, It ends up messing with our feelings and emotions towards the place itself. This could also be the meaning of the word “punctum”. Barthes talks about the two parts of a picture studium and punctum, and talks about the world punctum in photographs and says: “I shall therefore call punctum; for punctum is also: sting, speck, cut, little hole-and also a cast of the dice.”(12). Barthes is absolutely right. That detail stings, hurts, and changes our view of the place. So if we go back to my story, the photographs of me and the album, It made me think about what I could actually find “different” at the front of my house using my eyes and get all those imperfections out because the mentality I have of everything because “perfect” and “positive” is not always true. Because I had that thought and intention when I opened the door to go out, I noticed something right away, the cement of the driveway has a bunch of holes, I searched up the reason for that and it’s because of the temperature and the air that was trapped in during the mixing and pouring of the cement, I understood that but that didn’t change the feeling I got after seeing those holes. The holes gave me this kind of disgusting feeling and a somewhat disturbing kind of feel because it was like a “flaw” of the view I had of the front of my house. The picture that my eyes captured and saved in my memories doesn’t have that “flaw” so it made the front of my house feel somewhat different than what I thought it was, even though it was just a small detail. Then, of course, I started realizing that yes, this place I call home definitely made me see the world in a more positive way because I thought of it as a perfect and positive home to grow up in but I found all these flaws, is that how the world is as well? Am I just ignoring that part because of the effect this place had on me or is it actually perfect?.

The visual of a place we see is the visual of the place after our eyes put a “mask” on top of it. The same way I did with my own house. Our eyes and brain only want to see something once and after that our eyes just retrieve the image of that place from our memory so we don’t actually see what’s exactly in front of us. Continuing my story of me being on a journey to look for details that my eyes just completely ignored. I found out that next to the tall tree right in front of the door is, what I’ve always thought to be just one type of plant around the tree, was actually two different types of plants!. I feel like through this journey I’m slowly removing a piece of the mask that is put in front of my eyes. Barthes was talking about, what I felt was a connection between real life and photographs, a situation that happens in the world of photography. “Yet, the mask is the difficult region of Photography. Society, it seems, mistrusts pure meaning: It wants meaning”(21). Barthes was talking about how photographs could be translated in a different way just to be convenient for what society what’s the meaning of the photograph to be. I believe the opposite is what happens with the eyes and the “masks” in front of the eyes when it comes to real life. Our eyes just want to see and move on, It doesn’t want to look for a meaning behind what it sees in real life which is the total opposite of what our eyes and brains do when it comes to photographs. That’s why our eyes miss a lot of things because of two reasons, the eyes have a mask in front of them and the reason behind the mask is because the eyes don’t bother or just want to see everything in an ideal light or in a certain way. This is what I discovered based on the mentality/idea that my house gave me which is that everything is perfect and I should always see the world/ situations in a positive light. The mask theory is also the same reason why my eyes totally missed that there were two types of plants under the tall tree AND that there’s some type of flower that’s growing on the tree. Some people might argue and say: No, we actually always see things as they are. That could be true for something new to you but only up to a point. It’s proven that the eye just captures and saves pictures of the overall view/ place. For example, think of a museum, but wait, how did you think of a museum when there is no museum in front of you?. That’s because the brain and eyes captured a picture of what a museum looks like long ago whether it’s from real life or a movie you saw or from a book. And could you tell me the details of the outside of the two museums you visited? I doubt it. That’s just how our eyes and brains work.

Through looking for details in the front of my house made me realize how the mentality I have about my house affected how I turned out to be as a human being. It’s true that everyone misses a lot of things that are right in front of them but we don’t all miss the same things. And what one misses truly speaks about the type of person they are. I feel like the front of my house affected me by making me always see everything in life in a positive and good light and just ignoring the “flaws” or “errors” in my life. And I feel like seeing the front of the house for the first time at a young age made me kind of get that mentality. This definitely made me think and question many things but it also was like an enlightenment moment where I got to step back and realize how my house affected me as a person and just ink about it. The brain and eyes work together to trick with people so much it ends up making us see everything that’s different as one and makes is ignore all the bad and good.