Book Review: Turner, P. (2012). A Field Guide for the Contemplative Photographer.

Turner, P. (2012). A Field Guide for the Contemplative Photographer. 1st ed. [ebook] Denmark, Maine, USA.

This 46-page book looks in its electronic version more like a Power Point presentation.  Each page is an image, a quote, or bulleted text.  As such, it's quite easy to read, so perhaps it fulfills its function as a field guide reference.

What might you refer to?  Turner's approach is weighted toward process rather than product, of using photography as a means of exploration, both of the subject and the photographer. Minor White seems to have been a major influence, but no specific religious or philosophical orientation is revealed.  Her method involves equipping the mind to engage with the photographic subject:  sitting quietly, relaxing the mind to prepare it to receive.  The contemplative photographer does not take photographs or shoot images, but waits respectfully for the subject to reveal itself.  To engage in this process, the photographer must be prepared to put aside expectations, as well as figuratively and literally to take back roads and lose his or her way.  The book is illustrated with several of Turner's dramatic landscape images, and the text with examples from the practice of landscape photography.  The same principles could presumably be applied to other genres with some modification.  While Turner's ideas are worthy of exploration, she offers little in the way of guidance about how one might start out along the way, surprising for someone who was a professional educator for three decades.

An author bio from A Sacred Journey: 

Patricia majored in photography and film making in the late 70’s and after a graduate degree in education from Harvard, taught in the public schools for 30 years. She didn’t begin photographing seriously again until 2005 when she got a grant from The Philanthropic Initiative, which gives grants to art teachers to pursue their own art. This grant allowed Patricia to travel to the Outer Hebrides where she “discovered” the concept of contemplative photography. Patricia began her blog, A Photographic Sage, in January, 2012. She's done some workshops in the field but seems most content to just use photography as part of her individual contemplative practice encouraging others, through her blog, to find their own way to explore this fascinating topic. Patricia has lived for the past 19 years in an old farmhouse in Western Maine with her resident philosopher, Emerson, a sweet cat that tolerates her long hours of reading and writing.

Book available at: http://www.365daysofinspiration.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2013/04/A-Field-Guide-for-the-Contemplative-Photographer.pdf [Accessed 12 Mar. 2016].

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