Berlin: Field Notes on Noticing

A photo essay on the art of photography and noticing, and why it's a reflection of self

By ten o'clock on our first morning in Berlin, I had bought a notebook I didn't need. This is how I know I like a place.

Our apartment happened to be directly opposite a small stationery shop, which meant that within a few minutes of arriving I had crossed the road, looked around, and found something to take back home with me. A souvenir. Result.

I had expected Berlin stationery to be functional: sensible paper, sensible pens, Bauhaus-inspired notebooks. Instead, there were beautiful little books, curious publications, art-house type prints and the usual collection of Berlin souvenirs – Checkpoint Charlie, the Wall, a few Volkswagens – mixed in with things that had nothing much to do with Berlin at all.

I liked it immediately. The stationery shop was one of those tiny, inconsequential details that would never make it onto a list of things to see in Berlin. In fact, I was speaking with a fan of the Stationery Freaks podcast who lives in Berlin, and she had no idea it existed either.

The stationery shopping was a wonderful start to what would be the usual family city break. We had, after all, come to do the proper things. Museums. Landmarks. The Wall. Galleries. The big buildings and the famous places.

And we did all of that, in the most amazing weather, and the boys didn't complain at all. We walked a lot, ate a lot, looked at a lot.

And I took photographs.

I always take photographs when I travel. The Ricoh GR usually comes with me, small enough to disappear into a pocket and always ready when something catches my attention.

What interests me now, though, isn't so much the photographs themselves. It's what they reveal about the person taking them.

Learning to notice

The first photograph I took in Berlin was of a giant globe.

The Welt balloon – or globe, or disco ball, depending on the light – stood opposite our apartment and was almost impossible to miss. At night it became a useful homing beacon, particularly on those evenings when we let the boys stay up later than usual, and were wandering around the city with misplaced confidence that we knew roughly where we were going.

It was big, bright and obvious. Which makes it a rather good place to start thinking about noticing. Because noticing sounds like a simple thing. You just look around, right? Pay attention. See what is there. Take a photo. Stick it on a website or social media.

But seeing isn't quite the same as noticing.

You can walk through a city without really seeing it. You can sit in a meeting without noticing the tension in the room. You can read a report without spotting the misleading number buried halfway down the page. You can work in the same organisation for ten years and never really see the system you are part of. You can look at the green status update and never see that the underlying team are reeling in overwhelm.

Some of the most valuable things in work are hiding in plain sight.

In plain sight are often queues that shouldn't exist. A customer workaround that everyone has accepted as just what we do here. A meeting that exists because another meeting exists, and everyone turns up and meets, even though nobody really needs to. A brilliant person who has stopped offering ideas because nobody listens to them – this is especially common. A process that made sense five years ago and now exists mostly because nobody has asked whether it should.

The opportunity isn't always missing. Sometimes our attention is. Often it's right there, if we choose to see. And this is one of the reasons I think creative practice is so useful.

Photography is, among other things, a discipline of attention. You walk down a street and something catches your eye. A shadow. A colour. A scooter with epic light behind it. The way two buildings meet. Someone sitting alone, or a group sitting together. A sign (I love signs). A wonderful bit of typography, or a colour combination you don't see very often. A reflection in a window, or somebody walking past a doorway.

Most of it passes unnoticed. Our brain does a wonderful job of filtering out most of what actually happens around us. Until it doesn't, and we notice something. We stop and look again, trying to make sense of what we noticed. We might move a little closer, or change our position, or turn our heads, or simply do a double take.

When we learn to pay attention, very ordinary things become interesting. We might spot something we've never noticed before or see things differently.

In fact, the other day, on a lovely walk around Winchester – a walk we've done a number of times – we noticed a house we've never seen before. It's from the 1800's, so it's been there longer than we've been walking this route.

It's only by looking that we see things that have been there all along.

And that's what a camera does. When we're out hunting for a good photo, we're training our brain to pay attention. We're noticing. We're looking around. And when we see something interesting, we're forced into a decision. This. Not that.

Photography is about deciding what belongs inside the frame and what doesn't. What matters. What can be ignored. Where the edges are. What relationship one thing has to another. What story we want to tell. What must be left for the audience to create their own story. What belongs and what does not. We apply this thinking when we take the photo, we will likely apply it later when we're editing, or sharing.

That process is a surprisingly useful way to think about almost anything, especially in our workplaces.

The things we choose

When I studied Media Science, there was a wonderful idea that's journeyed with me throughout my career. One module was on ethnography.

Ethnography is often described as the study of other people: how they live, what they do, how they behave, the cultures they create, the meaning that travels.

But my communication lecturer asked a much more interesting question:

How could the study of other people be about anything other than ourselves?

I've thought about that question for years. Because what we choose to observe is rarely neutral. Two people can walk down the same street and come home with completely different photographs. It's why photo walks with other photographers are such rich and wonderful activities.

One photographs architecture. Another photographs people. Another notices typography. Another takes pictures of food. Another photographs abandoned buildings. Another photographs shoes. Another takes just three or four photos of the night sky.

The city hasn't changed. The observer has. And our attention is a filter through which the world arrives.

The more I look back through my own photographs, the more obvious this becomes.

There are things I photograph again and again. Benches. Signs. Books. Buildings. Workspaces. Public spaces. Cars. Cows (yes, I know). Objects that have been designed well. Things that look as though somebody cared about making them. Places that give the impression that creative, important and interesting work is happening.

I look for the edges between old and new. Evidence of how people have adapted something for a purpose it wasn't originally designed for. Images that capture movement, potential and direction. And cityscapes – I love a good cityscape.

I didn't set out to create this collection of interests. I simply kept pointing the camera at things that drew my attention. Over time, a pattern emerged. The photographs became a kind of remarkable, but accidental, autobiography.

Seeing and having ideas

There is something else going on here.

The word idea comes from the Greek idein: to see. Isn't that interesting?

Because an idea isn't something that appears in your head, gifted to you from the spirits. It begins with seeing something.

You notice something that everyone else has stopped noticing, or didn't even notice in the first place. Then you wonder why, and what it means, and what it could be. You see a connection between two things that previously appeared unrelated. You imagine what something might become. You see possibility where someone else sees only the current state of affairs.

Perhaps this is why creativity and noticing are so closely connected. Photography trains the first part. You notice. You select. You frame. You make a relationship between things. And then, sometimes, you see something that wasn't quite visible before.

That isn't unique to photography. A musician listens for something that wasn't obvious in the room, or sounds from the world around them, or a lyric made up from something they see. A writer notices someone in a cafe that would be a perfect character, or a sentence nobody else paid any attention to. A filmmaker sees a scene in real-life that could become a story. A designer notices that the awkward problem everyone has worked around for years is actually the problem worth solving.

Creativity is often described as making things. I'm increasingly interested in the idea that it is first about seeing things. Seeing what is there. Seeing what could be.

Berlin through a noticing lens

This is what I found interesting about looking back at my Berlin photographs. I hadn't intended to photograph Berlin as a study of cities. But it was what I was drawn to.

I kept noticing how people used spaces. How old buildings had been given new purposes. How history sat alongside contemporary life. How things had been adapted, repurposed and made to work. How information was communicated.

How signs directed people around places. How public spaces encouraged certain behaviours, and discouraged others. None of these things were particularly dramatic, nor interesting to my family. But they were interesting to me.

In fact, I'm a terrible tourist photographer. The critique levelled at me is that I take more photos of what's around me, than of my own family. And, just for the record, I do take plenty of pics of my family too – just plenty of what's around also.

And perhaps that is the point. We tend to think of observation as something passive: looking at what is in front of us. I think it is much more active than that. We are constantly selecting from an enormous amount of information. The world gives us more than we can possibly attend to, so we filter.

We choose. We frame. We ignore. And those choices tell us something about ourselves.

Noticing as a practice

I carry a camera literally everywhere. I also carry a notebook for the things the camera can't – or shouldn't – capture. I've written before about the Art of Noticing and paper as thinking infrastructure, but I think they are the same thing in different forms.

They are tools for paying attention.

After a trip, I sometimes look through the photographs again and ask a wonderful little question:

Why did I take this? Not is it a good photograph? Not will anyone like it?

Just: Why this?

What made me stop and press the shutter? What did I see that other people might have walked past? What was I looking for without realising I was looking for it? What was on my mind when I took it? What problems am I trying to solve in life, and work, and did that have any bearing on this photo?

These questions are very revealing. They turn photographs into field notes. Not field notes about Berlin. Field notes about me.

The practice of looking

The world doesn't become more interesting because we travel necessarily. It becomes more interesting become we're more attentive to it. I think that's one of the great pleasures of travel. Everything is unfamiliar enough that our attention switches on.

A different sign. A different rhythm. A different kind of shop. A different way of sitting outside.

We notice because we haven't yet learned to ignore it. The trick then, perhaps, is to bring some of that attention home. To look at our own streets with the curiosity we reserve for foreign ones. To walk into the office as though we've never seen it before. To listen to a familiar colleague as though we haven't already decided what they are going to say.

To look at the process we've complained about for three years and ask what it actually looks like when studied from different perspectives. To notice how everyone in the business is simply trying to release some form of value, not make your day hard for no reason. To notice the person who has stopped speaking up, generating ideas and contributing to meetings. To notice the workaround.

The contradiction. The opportunity. The problem. The thing that went well. The thing everyone has accepted as normal. The person who really makes thing tick without fuss and drama.

Photography has taught me that the frame is never simply a record of the world. It is a record of what I chose to see. And perhaps that is why I keep taking photographs. Not because I am particularly interested in having a record of where I've been. But because every now and then, the camera makes me stop, look again, notice and pay attention.

And see something that was there all along.