Zen Photography Seeing is deceiving. It is like a magic act. Our own minds are the magician. As long as we believe our thoughts and perceptions, the magical illusion appears very real. And it can be quite wonderful. Although it can never compare with what actually is real. And that, as you and I both know, cannot be described. So my job as an artist, especially as a photographer, is to show ordinary things in ways you have perhaps never seen before. And this opens and expands the mind, thoughts and perceptions. It chips away at the tight limitations and confinements we all place on reality. It interrupts the illusion and allows something more real to emerge. I call this Zen Photography. It communicates the same things I try to communicate in writing, but it uses a different medium and does so without words. And by not relying on words, it can go deeper. It can bypass the mind and talk directly to the heart. And also I like beautiful things and see beauty everywhere, even in the most mundane things that everyone else seems to ignore. In sand, crumpled bed sheets, discarded paper towels. There is so much of life we dont see when we perceive through the limitations of our human minds, when we see only what we think we should see. Life is far more than this. Zen Photography is the practice of seeing in this new, fresh and open way. In 1965 Minor White taught photography at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He and his work made a great impression on me, just as the paintings of the early Zen Masters did. Towards his later years he began teaching photography as a spiritual practice. It was not the subject of the photograph that was important. It was the state of mind or consciousness of the photographer when the photograph was taken and of the viewer when the photograph is seen. In Zen this is known as transmission. The direct transmission of consciousness from one to another. This is certainly true in Zen Brush painting. But I have found it just as true in photography. So unlike most artistic training, the primary and most important practice is meditation. It is not so much photographing with the eye or the camera, but with consciousness itself. And rather than a photograph, it is this state of consciousness that is revealed and transmitted. Zen Photography, like Zen Brush painting, is much like a visual Koan. You may not know or understand what you are looking at when you see a Zen Photograph or Zen Brush painting, but something changes in you from the experience. Something opens in you you were not aware of before.
Posted on: Fri, 09 Jan 2015 06:59:06 +0000
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