Perception and Imaging: Photography--A Way of Seeing [Paperback]

The book is not specifically directed to photography. The book is an elementary book on the psychology of perception and vision. The book is suitable for a college freshman or sophomore art class. The chapter titles are:

1. SELECTION.
2. GESTALT GROUPING.
3. MEMORY AND ASSOCIATION.
4. SPACE, TIME, AND COLOR.
5. CONTOURS.
6. ILLUSION AND AMBIGUITY.
7. THE MORPHICS.
8. PERSONALITY.
9. SUBLIMINALS.
10. CRITIQUING PHOTOGRAPHS.
11. RHETORIC.

APPENDIX A. ADDITIONAL CONCEPTS.
APPENDIX B. ANSWERS TO SELECTED EXERCISES.
APPENDIX C. ADS FROM THE PAST.

Essentially every page contains a figure. There are plenty of color figures. Many or most of the figures are quarter page figures or half page figures. The quality of the color figures is excellent. Only a handful of photographs in the book are from famous photographers. There is one picture by Dorthea Lange, illustrating a girl with balloons, her image centered between certain round objects on the wall behind her, a photo by William H. Jackson, showing repeated sandstone shapes, a photo by Edward Weston illustrating the technique of grouping, a picture by Henri Cartier-Bresson depicting symbolic association, a photo by the author (R.D. Zakia) showing biomorphic shapes (shapes in nature that resemble human forms), a photo by Man Ray, showing similarity between a woman's back and a violin, and several others.

One wonders why most of the examples in the book are from graphics, oil painting, advertising, or from generic photographs. The year is now 2007, and there should be no shortage of photographs created by famous photographers, e.g., Dorthea Lange, Joel Sternfeld, Marion Post Wolcott, Martin Parr, etc., for use in teaching all the lessons shown in this book. The book might also be criticized for its occasional very elementary approach, for example, in its very brief commentary about Adobe Photoshop.

Overall, the depth of the writing is geared to the beginning college student. However, it is likely that even older adults will find something new, for example, in the disclosure of the Ostwald System, the Pantone Color Formula Guide, the CIE system of color, the "Cornsweet effect," and optical illusions classified as, e.g., "ebbinghous," "jastrow," and "delboeuf." Just for the record, it might be noted that page 63 has a diagram of a "poiuyt," an optical illusion that appeared on the cover of Mad Magazine in March 1965.

This gives examples of two amazing things disclosed by the book. An optical illusion comprised of hybrids of two photographs, changes depending on your viewing distance. Page 161 of Zakia's book shows this kind of illusion, where the hybrid is of a calm face and an angry face. Depending on the viewing distance, the face is either calm or angry. This illusion was so amazing that it made me cry out in surprise. Another illusion is a photograph of a woman posing in front of a tall blade of grass--a narrow leaf of some sort. Due to the shading in the cleft of the leaf, the illusion is that the woman has a crack or crevice in her face that splits her face in two(page 179).

If I lost my copy of the book, I would not buy another. The book simply cannot be characterized as being "about" photography. For a book that is really "about" photography, I recommend Why People Photograph by Robert Adams and Light Readings by A.D. Coleman.

The author, Richard D. Zakia, is Professor Emeritus at Rochester Institute of Technology. He has taught in many areas of photography including graphic design and multimedia design. During his 34 years at RIT, Dr. Zakia served as the chair of the Fine Art Photography Department and Graduate Program in Imaging Arts, and for a six-year period was a photographic engineer in development and research at Kodak. He is the recipient of the Eisenhart Outstanding Teaching Award and the author/co-author of 12 books on photography.

My reaction to Richard Zakia's 3rd edition of his Perception and Imaging book was two-fold. It was at the same time an intriguing visual delight and a classic in the field of visual perception. The majority of the 410 pages have black and white or color images illustrating a wide range of perceptual concepts that are clearly described in the text.

I'm an ardent photographer fascinated by images. So much so that when I open a New Yorker magazine I first look at the cartoons and then the photographs. If the photographs that accompany an article are sufficiently intriguing or powerful I cannot help but read the article. I did the same with Zakia's book on perception. When it first came I flipped through it looking at the images. If I was puzzled by an image or if it posed a question in my mind I read the accompanying text. This happened time and time again. I found some images totally surprising. For example I couldn't understand why an ad was included showing a wine bottle in a bottle-shaped wicker basket. To find out why it was included I read the text and when I looked at the ad again I realized there was no bottle there! Only a bottle label and a bottle cap. Because of the visual clues I saw a bottle when there was no bottle there. The ad was included to illustrate the concept of closure.

The above sneaky example made me to realize that if I wasn't careful I might learn something. I commend this book to others interested in visual perception with the caveat that if they aren't sufficiently careful they also will learn something. And they will be delighted.

I know that I will draw a great deal of critique for this review, but personally i did not find this book worth my time.

For how well it might be written, for how easy and understandable the examples might be, for how precisely documented it is, it does not have what I was looking for in it: a partly theoretical and partly practical toolbox to expand my creativity when I create an image.

The text is, as I said in the title, little more than a collection of well-catalogued, wide-ranging information regarding different fields of perception. Some of them are overly and uselessly technical, some are little more than tautologies, few are actually useful or stimulating. I could not find any reference, for instance, to "the rule of the thirds" (which might not be the ultimate principle of composition but is still an important starting point) but on the other hand there were more than a dozen paragraphs on colour notations and names, constantly moving between the obvious, the superfluous and the merely technical.

On a sidenote, I do not understand why American writers in general assume that their readers have the attention-span of a goldfish and try to fit everything they have to say on an argument in half a paragraph, only to start a completely new one immediately after. It doesn't help, it creates unacceptable over-simplifications.
Teaching is not made of putting on the table individual information, sweetened by a profusion of quotes and aphorisms. Teaching is a sequential activity, it involves a long propaedeutic phase, it entails the creation of foundations and builds upon them to get in the end to the real content. A book that teaches well cannot be accessed randomly at any page without missing any context. Useless to say, this one can.

Andrea B., Verona