Our species has evolved over millions of years. Our own set of tools, the ones, at least, that we use in making or viewing photographs, is a very recent development. It is of no use to hunters/gatherers to cultivate an abstract sense of space. For them, survival depends not upon understanding context; rather, they must separate plants and animals, their food, from context.
Imagine two stone age hunters standing at the edge of the forest. One says to the other "I think it would look better if that bison would move about three feet over to the left". No, the appropriate thing to do is to nail it right in the heart with an arrow. Without being able to center one's attention on the vital spot, the bull's eye, the community doesn't eat.
I believe this instinct is alive and well in all of us. The cultivation of an appreciation for the contents of a frame, a sense of a whole space, is a sort of add-on, a luxury, if you think about it. In order for it to be meaningful, we have to have time and enough prosperity that we don't have to scrap for each meal. It doesn't come with the package we are born with. Many people, as Mr. Eggleston points out, really have no interest in developing that sense.
If circumstances change, and we find ourselves refugees as so many are today, we will need to rely upon the more basic and one could say primitive ability to isolate what we can eat, what we can shoot (!) from its context. Without being able to do that, we'd be helpless without our social support structures. While I am committed to a broader and more inclusive reading of context, an abstract spatial sensitivity, I think we too often forget how we depend on more basic skills and have a tendency to think ourselves superior because we've gone beyond them. I think it is important to go beyond them, but at least as important, not to lose them in the process.
