What differentiates the "soul" from the "seer" is that the word "soul" comes with thousands of years of religious connotations and associations, which tend to veer the "soul" off the road. The "seer" is much cleaner, and keeps us away from the edge.
A veering soul would be her cup of tea exactly. She, or at least her boss, likes to see souls in precisely that predicament.
Before I can answer the advocate's second question I'm going to need to get her to define "collective higher conscious." I've run across that vague phrase dozens of times, and at the least it suffers the same problems "soul" suffers.
She was merely wondering whether you mean that "seer" is specifically a personal/individual experience, or whether perhaps there is a greater overall collective intelligence or conscious being formed by that touch.
Being an advocate she isn't much of a proponent of the illogical, and finds that the old adagium usually holds: if it can't be explained by reason, then it must be some kind of religious experience. The "seer" to her is much like that. She doesn't deny that there may be more to experiences than what our senses alone provide, but there must be good reasons to deny an inability to explicate.
As an occupational deformation, she likes to argue her case which usually involves providing alternative interpretations. In that spirit, she would like to present an alternative interpretation of Winogrand's New Mexico.
What she sees is an unaccompanied toddler emerging from a black hole. In front of the child is a pavement of a nearly empty driveway with just a toppled trike. An additionally large part of the frame shows that in the background stormclouds are forming over distant mountains.
Well, an unaccompanied toddler walking alone out of the safety of its home is clearly a recipe for disaster, and in this case it represents very well the tabula rasa we all are before we embark on the journey of life. The journey of life nicely represented by the pavement with the toppled trike, the challenges and corresponding mistakes we will encounter and make while walking the path laid out before us. The storm is a foreboding of the challenges ahead, of the true sh*tstorm that life really is, that will form our final personality and character.
Why does she believe this to be a useful interpretation if it comes to art appreciation? Well, true art is timeless. The time and location of the architecture are not at all relevant for this interpretation, and considering the amount of architecture actually in the picture, she believes the photographer wasn't much interested in representing it.
It's an alternative interpretation she wants to give to you for consideration, if perhaps there might be subconscious logic at play. She realises full well this comes dangerously close to an artist's statement, but suppose that subconsciously you see those metaphores and understand at that subconscious level that there is a bigger picture presented here about life in a general sense. And perhaps that subconscious "knowing" or "learning" is the jolt you experience when seeing a moving piece of art and which you ascribe to a touch of the seer by perhaps an inability to explicate?