@Myst, I am pretty sure that the pure visual experience is contaminated, or at least highly limited by our expectations and our perceptual capacities. For example, photography changed how people understood visual phenomena. John Szarkowski in “The Photographer’s Eye” touches on this and says, regarding human limitations at perceiving time:

“The galloping horse is the classic example. As lovingly drawn through all the battle scenes and sporting prints of Christendom, the horse ran with four feet extended, like a fugitive from a carousel. Not till Muybridge successfully photographed a galloping horse in 1878 was the convention broken. It was this way also with the flight of birds, the play of muscles on an athlete’s back, the drape of a pedestrian’s clothing, and the fugitive expressions of a human face.”

And of course there’s so much out there about stuff like attentional bias (the invisible gorilla) and how people perceive all kinds of things according to wired-in cognitive preferences (universal principles of design) and detecting (or not detecting) microexpressions. I do think we can accept there is a “thing in itself” defined maybe as our initial sense impression, so long as we understand that this impression is already mediated and shaped in ways we aren’t generally conscious of.