While doing research for my previous post “Two-Dimension World” I came across a reference to the book The Mind’s Eye by Dr. Oliver Sacks. An entire chapter is devoted to stereoblindness. I also came across another chapter about face-blindness or prosopagnosia which is a cognitive condition.
I did not know that I suffered from face-blindness until I read about it. I have known for most of my life that I had difficulty recognizing faces but I never thought of it as anything abnormal. Because of the inability to recognize faces, I have relied on identifying people by the way they walked, how they talked or some other feature that acts as an identifier. Having this condition can cause awkward moments, especially in social situations when I can’t identify acquaintances but they know me. I usually don’t want to use the person’s name because it may not be who I think it is and I don’t want to use the wrong name.
A recent study by the Harvard Medical School found that one in 33 people may have some degree of face blindness which is more than previously thought.
Is there a connection between face-blindness and photography? In my case, I don’t think it matters when it comes to my personal photography. My condition seems to be limited to living human faces but some people have more severe symptoms where they also cannot recognize people in photos and others may not be able to identify objects.
The artist and photographer Chuck Close had prosopagnosia. He felt it contributed to his unique artistic vision and said “I don’t know who anyone is and have essentially no memory at all for people in real space, but when I flatten them out in a photograph, I can commit that image to memory in a way: I have almost a kind of photographic memory to flat stuff.”
Sleeping Mind Photography 