Seven Days in Tbilisi

27 March 

Tbilisi was intended as a week of photography.  I believe the idea was to engage in intensive shooting over the course of five or six days to deepen my practice and strengthen stamina and commitment.  I had my idea, made my reservations, but the trip was weeks away and I got involved in other things.

Then, it seems, I was in Tbilisi.

What should I do?  Shoot, of course.  I had finished the first chapters of Looking and Seeing, a Miksang course in contemplative photography, and was up to the first shooting assignment.  The work mirrors what I covered in The Practice of Contemplative Photography, but it rarely hurts to revisit assignments, especially when presented by new authors with perhaps a slightly different angle or emphasis.  So, first day out, I reviewed the assignment and set my intention to photograph color.

Good idea, bad idea.

Good because I had a purpose.  As I walked the city I reminded myself of color and sought again and again to relax into my environment by paying attention to step, gait, sound, smell, and touch.  I experienced a number of flashes of perception, of attention grabbing bursts of color.

Bad idea because this is my first visit to Tbilisi and I’m quite naturally interested in more than color!  There was a repeated back and forth between staying on task, and wanting to explore this new environment in something other than color.

Then I dipped back into the book and realized I would need more time to respond than I might wish during my limited time in Tbilisi.  Keeping up with the processing is a huge job.  I’ve so far completed only the first day’s images (sans keywording), which means I’ve now got a two-day backlog.  Perhaps I’m shooting more than necessary or even useful.

I thought it might be best to put the Miksang aside and just get out and enjoy shooting Tbilisi. That’s pretty much what I did yesterday and today, walking the neighborhoods and shooting whatever catches my eye:  people, houses, churches, streets, doors, architectural features, trees - the usual assortment.

Now I’m wondering how much I can possibly shoot and if I shouldn’t pull back and focus on the Miksang text.  What’s the purpose of making all these images?  What do I get from it?  Is it an exercise in pacifying a mind that won’t sit still, that needs something to make, some project on which to work?


28 March

Woke to gray skies and drizzle, which would have been just fine for a museum visit - except they are closed on Mondays.  I found an article exclaiming the charm of Kukia, the city’s oldest cemetery, so I took the metro for the first time, then a taxi up the hill.  It continued to drizzle throughout the morning and my shoes and pant legs took a soaking.  The cemetery seemed to lack whatever mystique the writer imagined.  It wasn’t uninteresting, but apart from two examples, I didn’t find much statuary, mostly gravestones and crosses.  The oldest graves dated from post-war, with earliest birth dates being 1880s.  I didn’t look in every corner of the cemetery.  I covered perhaps half of its territory in two hours of strolling up and down and back and forth.  Many graves are overgrown and appear to have been forgotten.  Those nearer the church are larger, newer, and better tended.  I did run into someone out back who may have been a caretaker.  He was at least taking care of the grave of what appeared to be a local saint, to which he led me.

The walk down from the cemetery wound through some run-down suburban neighborhoods.  One street was not even paved.  I ended up at the central railway station and then walked down Aghmashenebeli Avenue, a posh shopping street with plenty of Arabic hoardings.  Ended up at Marjanishvili Square where I had a coffee and some free wifi at the mammoth McDonalds, where I was set upon by a distraught American university student spending a couple of weeks in Georgia.  He seemed relieved to speak to an American.  If he’s this stressed after only two days, two weeks is going to seem like forever!

After four hours walking my back was begging for a rest and after my long sit at McDonalds, I thought I would just go back to the hotel and soak in a hot bath, but felt guilty about giving in so early.  On the way to the station, I stood on a street corner with lots of traffic and just shot at whatever came by.  After 15 minutes and mostly crap, I decided there must be more fruitful means of practice.  So I headed up the side street and to my surprise had a fabulous shoot.  At least I think I did - I haven’t yet looked at the photos.  But the walk _felt_ good, even with my tired back.

I think that’s because it wasn’t planned and I wasn’t expecting anything.  I was just killing time before going back to the hotel.  Surprisingly, I had quite a few spontaneous interactions.  People made eye contact and some even invited me to shoot.  It was a marvellously magical 15 minutes of unscripted, unsolicited fun.


03 April

I’m now back in Dubai and wondering about the value of the time I’ve spent taking and processing over 1000 images.  What did I get out of the experience?  Did I become a better, smarter photographer, or have I simply amassed a large collection of images that few will ever see?

My Lightroom catalog currently holds 1148 images.  There were at least 200 more I deleted almost immediately after import because they were poor quality or duplicates of action taken in continuous mode. I flagged, developed, tagged, and exported 423 images.

I can’t imagine anyone will be interested in all 400, so I thought it might be better to pare this down.  To how many?  One common ratio is 10%.  That would leave me with a selection of 100.  Over the seven days I was in the city, this would amount to 14 images per day, still a high average, but doable and perhaps not a strain on viewers if doled out say in 10 images a day for 10 days.  I made an initial selection without keeping count of what I considered the stronger images and ended up with a folder of about 125, which seems to demonstrate the applicability of the 10% rule.  I decided to omit most of what I call the images of formal properties - color, line, texture - on the principle that they might not be of interest to the general viewer and could perhaps best be presented separately.  I also omitted the series of images of pedestrians in front of the metro station, from which I will attempt to make collages.  In addition, I have the old photos and postcards, which I will scan and present as yet another set.

The question remains as to the value of the experience.

Because of the burden of processing, by day five I was beginning to despair of taking out my camera.  But I soldiered on and actually took what could be some of the better pictures of the week in the last days.  Not perhaps because my technique had improved, but simply because I found things that I hadn’t earlier, like the stairwell with the amazing light.  Working repeatedly every day taking and processing images I became more sensitive to exposure settings, both in camera and on the computer. I gained more confidence getting closer to people, and having the luxury of seven days with nothing to do but shoot I had the time to experiment, such as the series of pedestrians at the Metro station.  But once I got back to Dubai and reviewed what I had I wondered what it all amounted to.  I’m still not sure, but I ask myself, If I hadn’t done this, what would I have been doing?  And this then seems as valuable as anything else I might have imagined.

Flickr album is here:  https://www.flickr.com/photos/80283129@N03/albums/72157666637861291

#