That’s me. Pareidolia is a Greek word, with “idol” at its root; the “c” at the end (as in mania-maniac) refers to a person described by the noun. But “idol” here is not “something worshiped”; merely “image”. Images of concrete things are what I see in random places: rocks, snow ice, shadows, even clouds. I photograph them often. Most are static enough to capture. But sometimes, a cloud image is gone by the time I raise the camera to my eye… unless I can anticipate, see it coming. And occasionally it appears only when I’m processing the shot later, having not realized until then what I have.
This condition is shared by many other people; plenty of them contribute, for example, to a Facebook group called “Things with Faces”. It might be a torment to some, but for me it’s mostly a joy, even if what I see is not always pleasant. The face of Death, an angry skull, is one such example. It first appeared to me as part of the “mountain wall” across the Enguri River from our village of Etseri, in Svaneti: on the morning of 9/11, 2022, after a light snowfall brought it out. I know now that it is quite sensitive to the amount of snowfall: too much or too little won’t reveal it, though I know where it waits. Its changing appearance must account for the fact that I did not see it for all the years prior to 2022, though. No guarantees.
Many of the things I’ve seen and photographed here have become the bases for fantastic stories I write about this mysterious and wonderful “other life” in nature, particularly in Georgia, mostly in Svaneti. Just when I think the stories are finished, along come new images to deepen them, enrich them.
Rust, particularly light rust on new sheet steel in a particular open-air steelyard in Tbilisi, is another great source for my seeing gift to find fulfillment. There is no guarantee that what I find will be beautiful; but more often than not it is. This is a whole different way of seeing the world, full of delight and wonder, hard to describe.
Tbilisi’s meager ice puddles on the few days when it gets cold enough to produce them also give me much to discover, as does ice anywhere. Often I need a macro lens, or at least one which can get me quite close to my tiny subject; whereas, with rock faces and clouds it’s usually the long lens I need, to zoom in to huge subjects far away.
The bottom of my coffee mug (I don’t drink instant, so there’s always a bit of grounds left). More inspiration, up to three times daily! I never know what I’ll find, anywhere, anytime. Wood grain. Cracked paint. Crumpled fabric. Haphazard arrangements of similar objects of any size.
An awareness of fractal geometry, in both nature and mathematics, also informs the ways that I experience the world. There are patterns which repeat themselves, with variations, at different scales all over the universe, from the unimaginably huge to the barely-discernibly tiny.
Two recent sets of faces I shot from one of our Etseri house’s upstairs windows, in two separate images, come to mind. One is the 3/4 profile of an old man with a beard and possibly an open mouth; the white parts are clouds, the dark ones forest. Him I didn’t see until he jumped out at me as part of a larger image. He is benign, even kindly looking, and I was delighted to find him. He is alone in this image, and so fleeting that I might have missed him had I seen him and then tried for a photo.
The other shot, on the contrary, gave me a face (one of many) through the viewfinder of my camera with a long lens set to 300mm. But here, too, there was much more to see, as a thin dusting of snow picked out textures on our “mountain wall”. Such a jumble of other faces: sharing features, varying in scale, but all with one thing in common. They’re all evil. So much so that the quotation that first comes to mind is a scene from the Gospels of the Bible, in which Jesus Christ is casting out a demon from the man it was tormenting. It tells Him in departing that its name is “Legion; for we are many”. So, yes, sometimes the things I see are enough to make me shudder. Others bring me joy, hope, peace.
I suppose that at some point I need to show my photos to people and simply ask them to describe what they see, with no prompting at all from me. That would be interesting, and would bring an element of objectivity into the process. I’m not the only one seeing these things! Even if not everyone has pareidolia, at least some percentage of the population of the world shares it with me. The “Legion” image would be a good case in point: Does anyone see a single non-evil face in this crowd of visages, or not? Or even a single face, if not evil itself, at least not being tortured?
As good a definition as any for pareidolia could be “a haunting by nature.” I wouldn’t divest myself if it could. It feels like an extra sense which far from everybody has, as well as something which, once identified, can be exercised, strengthened, until it becomes second nature or semi-automatic. I’m glad, in the balance, to have it.
Blog by Tony Hanmer
Tony Hanmer has lived in Georgia since 1999, in Svaneti since 2007, and been a weekly writer and photographer for GT since early 2011. He runs the “Svaneti Renaissance” Facebook group, now with over 2000 members, at www.facebook.com/groups/SvanetiRenaissance/
He and his wife also run their own guest house in Etseri: www.facebook.com/hanmer.house.svaneti
