Pareidolia
Work Zone
Laying in the lakeside sand pleasantly exhausted from swimming during the heat of a Texas summer afternoon we kids would watch the legions of brilliant cumulus clouds marching north from the Gulf Of Mexico. “That one looks like an elephant” someone would say. “Look, that one over there is turning into a snake”. I never got that. The beauty of those puffing florescences against the blue ocean of sky was enough for me.
It was only decades later when I photographed an oak tree clinging to a crag that it hit me, but not at the moment of framing the image and clicking the shutter. At home, when I saw my photo on the big screen an eye looked back at me. The spirit in things spoke . . .
Pareidolia is
the tendency for perception to impose a meaningful interpretation on a nebulous stimulus, usually visual, so that one detects an object, pattern, or meaning where there is none.
