Learning to See
On our first day of the 2021-2022 school year, The Star-Splitters woke to wonder, via a short video made for us by former New York Times photographer Cary Conover, who introduced us to the work of Abelardo Morrell, who, during the Y2K crisis, checked into a hotel room in Times Square, blacked out the windows with black curtains, cut an aperture in one curtain the size of a dime, then took photos as the world rushed through the window's open eye, bathing the night-table and bed, the carpet and the walls.
Morrell had turned his room into a camera obscura ("dark chamber"), the forerunner of the camera and an analogue to the eye. In so doing, had turned a time of anxiety into an occasion for wonder.
When The Star-Splitters arrived on campus later that morning, their classroom had been similarly transformed. As our eyes adjusted to the darkness, we saw the outside world pour through our room's waiting pupil and become our walls, our whiteboards, our ceiling, our floor.
We drew what we saw; we wondered about the ancients. We talked about the workings of the human eye, the advent of photography, about Vermeer and Kepler, about the miracle of light.
"The best thing that we're put here for's to see," Robert Frost wrote in the poem that gave our cohort its name. All year, we did just that--learned to see: premises in arguments, assumptions encoded in tools and technologies, deeply embedded workings of poems and plays, essays and stories, historical movements, scientific studies, paradigm shifts. All year, we learned how to see what's right before our eyes.
The Star-Splitters' open eye to the world's wonders
We covered the windows in trash bags, then cut a hole the size of a dime.
Before we opened the room's pupil. The back wall, covered in white cloth, represented the eye’s retina, upon which would project, upside down, all that the pupil allows.
The Wight-Stanley House behind our camera obscura classroom rushed through the dime-sized aperture and became the far wall.
We watched in awe as, on the west whiteboard, the tree just east of our room's pupil swayed in the breeze outside.
On the east whiteboard appeared the line of apartment buildings just west of the Wight Stanley House, as well as the vehicles parked in front of them.