West Coast photographer Chris Johnson opens his first solo exhibit at the Monterey Museum of Art.

Why are we so bad at taking photos? Despite the fact that billions of people take at least a photo a day, most of us aren’t that good at it.

“We don’t see people,” replies Chris Johnson, a photographer and educator – and he means this both verbatim and as a metaphor. To beginners, he advises first realizing the limitations of the human eye. We are prisoners of a very limited, if precise, focal point, meaning that despite our sense of seeing the big picture, to see something in detail, we pay a huge price and turn most of the picture off.

“Try to see how the camera is seeing,” Johnson says. “Then – and that’s a higher level – understand that each person carries a story. The goal is to create the image that tells that story.”

The story of Johnson’s life, “a visual chronology” titled In My Life, is coming to the Monterey Museum Of Art.

Taught and mentored by photography legends Ansel Adams, Wynn Bullock and Imogen Cunningham, Johnson started with large black and white portraits. Critical early works, like Untitled Triptych, explore the complicated dynamic between Johnson and his mother.

“I decided to go back and use the child abuse incident I experienced,” he says. “It’s risky, but important. It’s also surprising to some people who think of African American men as tough and silent.”

Later work is almost exclusively captured in color film or digital; his most recent portraits are of his family and wife captured on iPhone cameras.

“It was very hard to do,” Johnson says of the six months he spent putting the show together while also working as a full-time professor and chair of the photography program at the California College of the Arts.

The show is curated by fellow photographer Martha Casanave. “It was really important to have a curator with a different point of view and a strong voice,” Johnson says of Casanave. “I deeply admire her, and portraiture is her specialty.”

Because the lens of the camera is more objective than a human eye, photography is, per Johnson, linked to the truth more directly than painting or writing or dancing.

“Photography tells the truth in a different way than any other arts,” he says.

IN MY LIFE by Chris Johnson opens Thursday, Sept. 8. Monterey Museum of Art, 559 Pacific St., Monterey. 372-5477, montereyart.org.