Like almost everything else we do, looking at the world can get to be a habit. When it does, we can end up looking at things without really seeing them -- taking the world for granted instead of examining it carefully.
There's always more than one way to look at anything. The position from which a person looks at something is called a viewpoint or a point of view. And one of the ways photographers challenge our habits of seeing is by exploring different points of view.
Sometimes they startle us when they do this, because they've looked at something familiar from an angle we've forgotten about, or perhaps one we've never thought of before. But as we grow older we develop our ability to understand what we see. And we also remember a lot of what we've seen during our lives. We may not be aware of how many ways we can recognize something until a glimpse of it from some unusual angle lets us identify it.
What happened when you first looked at this photograph? Did you realize immediately that it was a rhinoceros? If so, you've probably seen a rhino from behind, and could recognize it from these unexpected visual clues. Did it puzzle you until you read the picture's title? If so, you may never have seen the back end of a rhino. In any case, if you were asked to draw a rhinoceros, this probably isn't the way that you'd first think of to represent it.
This photo reminds us that there are always other possibilities to consider. That's an extremely important lesson in photography. Looked at from an unexpected point of view, even the most ordinary subject can become truly surprising.
