You might see what I see, and recognize it, and name it, with no prompting. Or I might tell you a subject before you see the photo, and you see it, immediately or eventually. Or you might not be able to see it at all, my least preferred choice. This would mean that only I “get it”, which sounds a bit crazy. But such is the nature of pareidolia, about which I have written before: The Greek word meaning to see ordered shapes, recognizable things, in the randomness of nature. Clouds, shadows, reflections, showing faces, animals and more.
I wrote in the notes for a book I am working on a short list of images I was still lacking, to go with the stories in the book; and also a list of stories yet to write from certain images. The former included a dragon of cloud. On the morning of July 24, 2023, this image was fulfilled, as I looked out an upstairs window of our Etseri house in upper Svaneti and shot, once every few seconds or so for nearly an hour, the rapidly changing clouds racing across the sky in front of and over the “mountain wall” across the Enguri river from us. Winds were dragging wisps around, some breathlessly fast, others behind them slow and stately, some curling around themselves in spirals. The light, too, changed from moment to moment as sunlight lit up sections of the wall for instants at a time. There was no time to waste. But eventually, a cloud bank rolled in and obscured everything for a while. I retreated, until the next spectacle began, an hour or more later, several times throughout the day.
I wondered: would it come today, answering the presentiment and hope I had? And, would I “shoot first and ask questions later”, or see first, know what I had, and shoot as quickly as I could, hardly daring to believe? It turned out to be the both: I saw some of the dragons coming and was ready; others took me by surprise later as I reviewed my digital images. It does happen that I see something afterwards on the computer screen, in post-processing, having shot it much earlier: this was even the case with the Grandparents in front of Ushba, the first story I wrote on this theme. But how much of the time are the clouds playing with forms unseen by even a single sentient observer! Person-years, decades, can go by with not one person on earth looking up, or out, and noticing. Being prepared, and taking the time, goes a long way. There was something in my mind’s eye, not cartoonish or funny, but serious; an amalgam perhaps of all the dragons I have seen illustrated in many different cultures of the world. And here it came (on several separate occasions, even; one with a clear eye, the others not); and I made its photographic portrait in the seconds before it changed entirely into something my vision simply failed to parse at all, just clouds.
I knew that I was seeing what I had been seeking, and not seeing other things, or at least not noticing them. So there is an element of filtering going on, more mental than visual processing. Someone else at my side might have seen, unprompted by me, completely other things from what I discovered. But I treasured what came to me, recorded it, and was glad. The book is forming, images and stories together in symbiosis. Seek, and see.
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 nearly 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
