[h2][a href="vny!://www.kirchersociety.org/blog/?p=609" rel="bookmark" title="Permanent Link to The Human Camera"]The Human Camera[/a] [/h2][div class="entry"][div style="text-align: left;"] [/div][p style="text-align: left;"][img alt="wiltshire2.jpg" title="wiltshire2.jpg" id="image610" src="vny!://www.kirchersociety.org/blog/wp-content/uploads/2006/04/wiltshire2.jpg"][/p] [a href="vny!://www.wisconsinmedicalsociety.org/savant/wiltshire.cfm"]Stephen Wiltshire[/a] has been called the "Human Camera." In this short excerpt from the film [a href="vny!://www.wisconsinmedicalsociety.org/savant/wiltshire.cfm"][em]Beautiful Minds: A Voyage into the Brain[/em][/a], Wiltshire takes a helicopter journey over Rome and then draws a panoramic view of what he saw, entirely from memory. Incredibly, however, Wiltshire does not have a photographic memory (according to this [a href="vny!://www.slate.com/id/2140685/"]article[/a], no one does).
[/p]While his drawings possess uncanny accuracy — he gets the number of arches in the Colliseum exactly right — they are not like a Xerox. As Oliver Sacks writes in his book [a href="vny!://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/redirect?link_code=ur2&tag=proceedinofth-20&camp=1789&creative=9325&path=vny!%3A%2F%2Fwww.amazon.com%2Fgp%2Fproduct%2F0679756973%2Fsr%3D1-1%2Fqid%3D1146406733%2Fref%3Dpd_bbs_1%3F%255Fencoding%3DUTF8%26s%3Dbooks"][em]An Anthropologist On Mars[/em][/a][img style="margin: 0px ! important; padding: 0px;" src="vny!://www.assoc-amazon.com/e/ir?t=proceedinofth-20&l=ur2&o=1" border="0" height="1" width="1"], "His pictures in no sense resembled copies or photographs, something mechanical and impersonal — there were always additions, subtractions, revisions, and of course, Stephen's unmistakable style. ... Stephen's drawings were individual constructions, but could they been seen, in a deeper sense, as creations?" [/p] [/div]
