FOREWORD

Photographs can be taken using a lens, but only the eye can make sense of meaning. In this creative business called photography, these two components meet the mechanical and the setting—the photograph and the eye—and together, something beautiful is made. A lens is absolute, an apparatus; the eye is selective, the medium. With these two devices, external and internal, the normal becomes exceptional; the temporal becomes permanent.

A lens is merely a detached device. It creates sharpness but lacks feeling; it creates clarity but does not induce deep thought. The perspective of the eye is given meaning together with the lenses. Their critical gaze, an interplay of lived experiences, passing thoughts, and raw emotions, fans out the cold substance of glass and metal to raw reality.

Every photo taken is a question waiting to be answered: What deserves to be seen? The answer is not in the lens but in the creator's spirit. It is the eye that sees significance in light, significance in texture, and significance in a glance. Thus, the eye sees these snippets of life and takes pictures through the lens to freeze the moments.

The following book is the thirteenth in a series and dovetails nicely with last year’s edition. It celebrates good photography as the interplay between the lens and the eye. It is not a desecration of the image where it is only seen as a composition; it is a ‘moment’ where a thought, an intuition, an inseparable world, and an artist combine to make something anew.

Through these pages, it is essential always to appreciate the relationship within. A lens cannot be anything unless the eye creates what’s novel. The characteristics of any frame are the core of the case: photography’s characteristics, where two things come together—optics as a science and art and sensitivity as humanity.

This collection will encourage you to gaze deeper than the images and the captured freeze moments and contemplate the stories behind the pictures. It is this unique relationship between the lens and the eye that pages into a printed photograph.

That is where the magic in photography lies.

K Sharad Haksar
Founder
One Eyeland