The Subconscious Eye: When intuition shoots before reason.

We live surrounded by stimuli. Lights, sounds, faces, conversations, screens… Our mind filters thousands of images and inputs every day without us even being aware of it. It’s a natural defense mechanism — otherwise, we’d be completely overwhelmed by the constant flow of information.

Yet sometimes, something slips through that filter — something that makes us turn our head, look twice, something that breaks through our inner patterns. And if we happen to have a camera with us, we simply lift it and press the shutter without thinking.

That brief spark, that moment we can’t quite explain, is what we could call the subconscious eye.

We could say that our photographic eye has three modes of operation (perhaps even more).

First, the rational mode, that search for the perfect composition — for the decisive moment that Henri Cartier-Bresson defined as the essence of control and precision.

Then, what we can define as the explorer mode, when we’re alert, open-minded, consciously scanning what appears before us and selecting what fits our vision.

And finally, the unconscious mode, when we’re distracted, not intentionally thinking about taking photos, yet something still “slips” into our visual field.

This subconscious eye operates at a deeper, more primitive level. It perceives light, shapes, and gestures subjectively — things that resonate with us, or that fall outside our usual patterns — all without rational explanation. Maybe it’s a familiar shadow, a distinctive face, a reflection, or something on a wall that simply doesn’t fit. They are triggers for our intuition. We don’t reason it; we simply know there’s a photograph there — and we shoot if the camera is in our hand.

But I think that there are two essential elements: preparation and luck.

Preparation means having a camera (or phone) ready, with at least a decent setup (this is something challenging).

Luck is that alignment — that perfect instant when everything unfolds before us and we manage to capture it.

Sometimes the photograph turns out blurry, or it simply doesn’t work. But other times, we get the reward: we discover something that was there all along, something that called our attention for reasons we can’t fully explain.

In this photograph taken in Brighton in 2015, our eyes automatically go to the girl — her green dress, her red hair, the hat, the stockings — a note of colour standing out from the grey surroundings. But if we take the time to really observe, we begin to uncover other details, to discover more within the frame. That's up to you.

Perhaps that’s why street photography feels a bit like therapy — a form of self-discovery, a deeper exercise in observation of the world around us, far from nature, trees, and wild animals. Every photo reveals both what we saw and what saw us.

And, what do you think?