We know exactly where the other person is wrong. But do we even see the other person anymore?
Turn on the news, and it sometimes seems as if we’re slowly losing the ability to understand one another. Protests, political squabbles, heated debates, and—on social media—an endless stream of people who are, above all, absolutely certain that the other side is wrong.
We’re talking more than ever. We react, share, correct, and judge. Within seconds, we form an opinion about someone we’ve never met and about a situation we sometimes know little more about than a photo, a video, or a headline. And perhaps that’s the strange thing about our times: we have access to more information and more people than ever before, but it doesn’t always feel as though that has helped us understand one another better.
Research by the Netherlands Institute for Social Research reveals an interesting dual picture. The Dutch are concerned about political unrest and the way we live together. At the same time, it’s too simplistic to say that we all live in completely separate camps or media bubbles. How we form our opinions is much more complex. What we see plays a role, but so do our past experiences, who we trust, who we talk to, and the reality through which we view the world.
That last point really stuck with me: from what reality are we actually looking at one another?
Shanghai really makes an impression
“I can’t remember what I saw first. The orange of his robe, his face, or his eyes. Probably his eyes.”
I was in Shanghai. A city that’s pretty much the opposite of quiet. Traffic, people, buildings that seem to just keep growing. Sounds where you don’t always know where they’re coming from, and smells that change every few meters. Food, exhaust fumes, hot asphalt, spices, perfume, and humid air. Shanghai really makes an impression. It’s a city that doesn’t politely ask if you’d care to pay attention for a moment. Shanghai grabs you by the collar and says: look.
And somewhere in the middle of that enormous city, I stepped into a temple. It was as if someone had turned down the volume. Not all the way off—I don’t think that’s possible anywhere in Shanghai—but lower. Dark wood, warm colors, the scent of incense, footsteps, and hushed voices. That distinctive sound of a place where people naturally start speaking a little more softly without anyone asking them to.
I had my camera with me. And then I saw him. A monk in an orange robe, standing quietly in a doorway. A face that seemed to hold so much more than I could ever capture in a single photo. I looked at him. He looked at me.
And then I did what Dutch people apparently do instinctively when they’re abroad. I started speaking English to him. He looked back at me kindly. No response. So I tried again. More slowly. Because somewhere in our brains, there’s apparently this strange notion that a language someone doesn’t speak automatically becomes understandable if you say it with enough pauses.
It didn't work.
Nyein didn't speak English. I didn't speak a word of Burmese. There we were. Two grown men. A Dutchman with a camera and a Burmese monk in a temple in Shanghai. Shared vocabulary: zero.
“And yet, a conversation began”
Not with words, but with attention. A smile, a glance, a small gesture. My camera. His eyes turning toward my camera. My hand, with which I tried to ask if I could take a picture. His reaction.
No Google Translate. No PowerPoint. No Teams meeting—and certainly no two-hour session titled “Optimizing Internal Communication.” Just two people who made an effort to understand each other.
And, amazingly enough, it worked.
I was taking photos, but I soon realized I wasn’t just taking pictures anymore. I was looking at him. Really looking. At his hands, his posture, the folds in his robe, the way he stood against the dark wood, and the light on his face. And especially at his eyes.
Meanwhile, he was looking at me just as intently. We sometimes forget that when we travel. We think we’re looking at something special. Meanwhile, that special thing is probably just looking right back at us. Maybe I was just as exotic to him. A somewhat older Dutch man with a Nikon around his neck who suddenly tries to have a conversation using his hands and feet. I probably would have taken a second look at myself, too.
Later, I learned his name: Nyein. A Burmese monk I met thousands of kilometers from home in a temple in Shanghai. We had no common language, and yet, in a strange way, our encounter felt more profound than some conversations in which thousands of words are exchanged.
Maybe we talk too much sometimes
That's a rather uncomfortable conclusion for someone who actually quite likes to talk. But still.
Language is amazing. We can use it to explain things, persuade others, negotiate, express love, argue, tell jokes, and run entire organizations. But language also has a curious side effect. Because we use the same words, we’re quick to assume that we mean the same thing.
Ask ten people what trust means. Or freedom. Leadership. Collaboration. Safety. Success. Love. Ten people, probably twelve definitions. And yet we have entire conversations as if our own definition were the instruction manual everyone received at birth.
With Nyein, that wasn't possible. I couldn't hide behind fancy words. Neither could he. I couldn't tell him what I meant and then assume he would have understood. We had to observe, wait, respond, and observe again.
There was something left that tends to disappear remarkably quickly in many conversations: attention.
Maybe that's where photography begins, too
Many people think that photography begins with looking. I’ve come to believe that it begins even before that: with stopping. Because as long as you’re moving, searching, judging, and thinking you already know what you’re seeing, you often aren’t really looking that closely. You’re mostly just recognizing things. Person. Monk. Temple. Shanghai. Photo. Click. Next.
Technically speaking, that could result in an excellent photo: sharp, well-exposed, with beautiful colors. Maybe even one that would make Instagram very happy. But for me, that’s not enough.
I want a photo to leave an impression. I want you to look at it just a little longer than you intended. I want you to wonder who someone is, what happened five seconds before the photo was taken or five seconds after. I almost want you to be able to hear something that isn’t in the photo. The temple. The city outside. The silence between two people who can’t understand each other.
That's where photography slowly starts to blend into fine art for me.
Fine Art Doesn't Start at the Wall
"Fine Art" sometimes sounds like you have to put on a black turtleneck first before you're allowed to use the word. You have to look very serious, rest your hand under your chin, and above all, don't laugh.
For me, it's much simpler. Fine art photography begins when you stop merely recording what's in front of you and try to convey what you experienced there. That's a fundamental difference.
The photo of Nyein is, in fact, just a photo of a Burmese monk in a temple in Shanghai. But if that were all there was to it, I probably would have forgotten it long ago. When I look at that photo, I feel the warmth all over again. I can almost smell the incense. I hear the muffled sounds of the temple and, somewhere beyond it, Shanghai rumbling on, undeterred. I see the dark wood and that almost unreal, intense orange. But above all, I remember what wasn’t there: words. And just how much was said precisely because of that.
That's what I'm looking for in myfine art photography. Not: "Look where I've been". But rather: “Look at what I saw there.” And maybe even: “Feel what I felt there.”
Make it stand out
The strange thing is that Nyein taught me something about organizations
Of course, I didn’t know that at the time. I wasn’t standing there across from him thinking,“Interesting, Marcel—we could definitely incorporate this Burmese monk into a theory on team dynamics later on.” Thankfully not. If I had, the meeting would probably have been ruined within three minutes.
But looking back, I see a connection. I’ve worked in organizations for more than thirty years. Boardrooms, management teams, change initiatives, presentations, strategies, targets, and—above all—a lot of meetings. Sometimes, after two hours, we’d walk out feeling like everyone had understood each other. After all, everything had been discussed.
Until, an hour later, you discovered at the coffee machine that five people had attended five completely different meetings.
The words were the same. The reality was not.
And that fascinates me. We don’t view what’s happening neutrally. We select, interpret, and fill in the gaps. We bring our experiences, expectations, uncertainties, beliefs, interests, and perspectives into the picture. Then we slap a rather ambitious label on it: reality.
That can be funny sometimes. And sometimes it can be pretty dangerous.
Give eight people a camera
That’s why, during my Photography Experience and when I work with teams on the “12 photos, 8 assignments, and 1 winner” challenge , I find it so interesting to give people a photography assignment in exactly the same spot. Same landscape, same light, same moment, and same assignment.
You'd expect the photos to look alike. Forget it.
One person sees a huge tree. Another only photographs the shadow beneath it. Someone else sees a pattern in the bark. A fourth person waits for a hiker to walk by. And number five? That person didn’t photograph the whole tree. That person saw something else.
No one is lying. No one is wrong. They were simply looking at the same world from their own perspectives. And that’s where it gets interesting. The question isn’t “Who took the best photo?”, but “Why did you see this and I didn’t?”
At that moment, a camera becomes more than just a device for taking pictures to me. It becomes a mirror. It reveals what someone is looking at, what someone finds important, and—just as interesting—what someone leaves out of the frame.
And that brings us back to the news
Maybe that’s why that image of Nyein keeps coming back to me whenever I look at our world. Sometimes we seem to know instantly who the other person is. Left. Right. Woke. Boomer. Elite. Wappie. Manager. Employee. For. Against.
It's actually pretty handy, a label like that. After that, you hardly ever have to look at the person behind it.
But a person isn't a hashtag. A colleague isn't a job title. And someone with a different opinion isn't automatically someone who hasn't thought things through.
That most certainly does not mean that every opinion is equally valid. To me, seeing things differently does not mean that facts suddenly become relative or that everyone is automatically right. On the contrary. It means that you are curious enough to question your own observations as well.
And maybe that's where it starts: not by looking at others differently, but by looking at yourself differently.
I’ve had to learn that myself. After all, it’s a lot easier to see where someone else is looking in the wrong direction than to examine the beliefs you yourself have accepted as truth for years. What beliefs do I hold? Which people have I perhaps judged too quickly? Where have I mainly seen what I wanted to see? And when was I so convinced that I was right that I stopped really looking?
That's not always easy. You can focus a camera by turning a ring. Unfortunately, it's a little more complicated when it comes to yourself.
But for me, that’s precisely where the essence of seeing things differently lies. Not constantly looking for what the other person is missing, but every now and then turning the camera around, so to speak.
Why do I see what I see? Why does this affect me? What lessons do I take away from this experience? What might my judgment say about me? And the hardest question of all: what do I not yet see in myself?
Perhaps that’s where true understanding begins. Not in immediately agreeing with one another, but in the willingness to acknowledge that the other person is looking at the same world through a different window—and that your own window isn’t always as clear as you think it is.
Make it stand out
Back to Nyein
I look at his photo again. He’s standing between two wooden doors. His hands rest calmly at his sides. The orange of his robe stands out sharply against the dark wood, and that impressive head. And that gaze, fixed right on me.
I still don't know exactly what he was thinking at that moment. Maybe he found our encounter just as special as I did. Maybe he was just thinking, " There goes another guy with a camera. " That's possible, too.
And, strangely enough, I think that’s beautiful. I don’t have to fill in the blanks of his story for him. Maybe that’s exactly the lesson. We don’t always have to know right away what someone is thinking, meaning, or feeling. Sometimes we just don’t know. Watch. Listen. Be curious.
Nyein and I didn't speak a common language. Yet we found common ground. Not because one of us started speaking louder. Not because one of us won. Not because I convinced him I was right or he convinced me he was.
We did something much simpler. And apparently, something that has become quite complicated these days.
We saw each other.
I traveled thousands of kilometers to China to meet a Burmese monk at a temple in Shanghai, but I couldn’t have a proper conversation with him. And yet it was he who showed me once again how few words you sometimes need to truly connect with someone.
Maybe that's why we shouldn't try even harder to explain why we're right. Maybe we should do something else first.
Let's pause for a moment. Take a look. And ask ourselves one question:
What does that other person see that I don't see right now?
