Book Review: Hoffmann, T. (2014). Photography as Meditation: Tap Into the Source of Your Creativity.

Hoffmann, T. (2014). Photography as Meditation:  Tap Into the Source of Your Creativity. San Rafael: Rocky Nook.

This a review of half a book.  I started reading it before a summer trip and once on the road found myself too occupied with my new environment to continue reading.  I might have carried on had the writing and ideas been more compelling.  Frankly, I found them somewhat muddled and uninspiring and once off the road and back to my routine didn’t have the energy to start again.  Perhaps another day.

If you haven’t read much on meditation or contemplative art practice, you might find this book engaging.  It presents many ideas common to the subject and explored in many essays, lectures and books seeking to understand image making in relation to the existential questions of the human experience.

This is not a book-length treatment, but more of a diary or blog, with short entries on one or two ideas, many of them later reintroduced and looked at in relation to newly introduced ideas or concepts.  Among the issues of concern are practicing for the sake of understanding rather than for adulation, developing a voice, experiencing stillness, and using image making to develop a more penetrating understanding of existence.  Long-standing photographic concerns  - Barthe’s studium and punctum, and the objectivity of photographs, for example - are examined in light of contemplative practice.

What book next?

In my studies of contemplative photography, I have now read and worked through the exercises in Karr/Wood’s The Practice of Contemplative Photography, and McQuade/Hall's Looking and Seeing.  As background I have read True Perception, Trungpa Rinpoche’s talks on dharma art.

Another workbook from McQuade/Hall is set to be released in fall 2016, but that project has already been delayed and may be delayed again. 

I have found two more books in this tradition.   From the reviews online, it seems Julie DuBose’s Effortless Beauty is more a collection of reflections on her practice, rather than a programmatic teaching text. Michael Wood’s Opening the Good Eye appears to be much the same.  DuBose’s text looks more interesting for including a discussion of editing, something largely avoided by Karr/Wood and McQuade/Hall.

Anyone have any personal experience with either text?

I am presently engaged with Hoffman’s Photography as Meditation, a collection of reflections on the intersection of Zen and photography (and not a workbook).  Also on my bookshelf is Gross/Shapiro’s Tao of Photography, as well as a collection of Minor White essays.

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Book review: McQuade & Hall. (2015). Looking and Seeing: An Introduction to Nalanda Miksang Contemplative Photography (Way of Seeing Book 1)

McQuade & Hall. Looking and Seeing: An Introduction to Nalanda Miksang Contemplative Photography (Way of Seeing Book 1). Drala Publishing, 2015

The preface makes no bones about the authors' focus:  "...we are really talking about Enlightenment."

The purpose of Miksang is not just to make pictures, but to reorient vision in order to wake up to the world beyond things.  "The most direct way to spontaneous creativity [is] not in “breaking the rules,” [but] in making contact with the world before there are rules at all.”  This can be accomplished, the authors believe, with just a short shift of orientation, or Enlightenment by a few degrees.  They compare the mind to a ship, whose destination can be radically altered by a course change of just a few degrees.

The authors are students of Sakyong Trungpa Rinpoche, one of the first Tibetan refugees of the early exodus to settle and build a Buddhist community of westerners within the United States, and of his disciple, Sakyong Mipham Rinpoche.

This text promises to be the first of three outlining the practice of Miksang, a Tibetan word meaning "good eye."  While the authors feel Miksang is best taught, or transmitted, in face-to-face encounters, they realize as well the value of texts in being able to provide more detail than available in workshops, seminars, or lectures.

Book review: Trungpa, C., Lief, J. and Trungpa, C. (2008). True perception: the path of dharma art.

Trungpa, C., Lief, J. and Trungpa, C. (2008). True perception:  the path of dharma art. Boston: Shambhala.

This book constitutes the philosophical foundation of Miksang, sometimes known as Contemplative Photography, as taught by Trungpa Rinpoche, a Tibetan Buddhist spiritual leader and one of the first lamas to teach westerners in English vernacular.  His community proved to be long-lived and is known today principally as the center of a large Buddhist publishing concern, Shambala, and for a 4-year college, Naropa, the only accredited Buddhist institution of higher learning in the the United States.

This volume is not a treatise, but rather a collection of short texts, mostly transcribed talks on practice and aesthetics.  The book is comprised of 28 chapters, most only a few pages long.

The editor’s introduction summarizes Trungpa’s life, motivation, and goals, providing context for the texts that follow.  In essence, Trungpa was using a somewhat secularized version of Buddhist principles and practices to build an intentional community through which might emerge an enlightened society.  He was concerned with more than meditation or even art, but with all aspects of social engagement and management.

A look at some "official" space images

McQuade and Hall admit that space is the most difficult concept to teach and the most difficult for students to grasp. Perhaps no one understands, but is afraid to say so.

Given the confusion, I thought it best to review some of the images published on Miksang sites run by authorized teachers.  If any images might offer a clue, it might be these.  

To the right is a screen shot from the Space gallery at Seeing Fresh, a website to promote Andy Karr's Contemplative Photography, a somewhat secularized copy of Miksang from a Miksang student.  The gallery features images submitted by students but selected by whoever runs the site, presumably Mr Karr or someone authorized by him.

Looking and Seeing: Section Six: View Interlude

It seems the authors' use of view is equivalent to philosophy, one’s “point of view.”  This section dips into the ideas underlying the practice. The authors proceed with a review of the flash of perception as an unconditioned experience, something that happens to us, something that interrupts our everyday experience of the world.  The reality is that this flash is the reality behind the ideas that color our understanding of the world.  Our ideas are the equivalent of clouds, the flash of perception a gap in the clouds allowing us to see what has always been there waiting for us to discover (or perhaps rediscover, as children seem to have largely uninterrupted access).  

Assignment: Forms of Surface: Pattern

It seems the week got away from me.  Bicycled and shot through Abu Hail and Hor Al Anz, shot a bit in Dragon Mart, but otherwise didn’t much follow-up on specific assignments until Sunday, when I took a morning walk around the nearest bit of Nadha to our campus.  When I set out I was very much goal motivated, but fortunately I was able to relax by the time I got to where I wanted to start shooting and the morning was quite fruitful, with many interesting perceptions.  My intention was to look for light, texture, and pattern.  Here’s some of what presented itself.

Assignment: Forms of Surface: Texture

Texture is described as where vision and touch overlap.  In making or viewing images of texture, “the viewer should feel as if she is touching it with her eyes.”  The authors suggest that in exploring this aspect of the visual, one not look for objects you know to have texture.  These are the easy shots.  Look instead at objects that don’t appear to have discernible texture.

Looking and Seeing: Assignment: Front, Side and Back Light

Side light adds a bit of depth to the sign. 

Because of the lack of contrast, front light typically flattens a subject.  The only shape or form is often the outer line, but nothing within.  Side lighting is most often used in portrait photography as it provides more contrast and thereby greater volume to the subject.  Back lighting is often the most dramatic, but also the most difficult to photograph as one must often expose for great contrast.  The assignment description is quite loose here and allows for exploring these individually or together.  No specific number of images are prescribed.

Notes: McQuade & Hall. Looking and Seeing: An Introduction to Nalanda Miksang Contemplative Photography: Preface, Sections 1 and 2

McQuade & Hall. Looking and Seeing: An Introduction to Nalanda Miksang Contemplative Photography (Way of Seeing Book 1). Drala Publishing, 2015

“John McQuade is one of the founders of Miksang Contemplative Photography, which he has presented for thirty years. He is the most senior teacher of the Nalanda Miksang school. John is a long time meditator, meditation instructor, and Shambhala Training director in the Shambhala tradition. He practices Daoist Qi-gong and writes on the contemplative arts. He holds an M.A in Phenomenology and a PhD in Social and Political Thought.

Miriam Hall is a contemplative arts teacher who lives in Madison, Wisconsin, and travels internationally to teach Nalanda Miksang, Shambhala Art, and contemplative writing. She is the second most senior teacher under John McQuade in the Nalanda Miksang School. She has been teaching these practices for over ten years...."

For a text explicating an alternative means of image making, the pedestrian cover image is unlikely to to inspire many to inquire further.

Book Review: Karr, A. and Wood, M. (2011). The practice of contemplative photography.

Australian edition cover

Karr, A. and Wood, M. (2011). The practice of contemplative photography. Boston: Shambhala.

This book was something of a revelation when I bought it at the start of my formal photography education, but as I quickly became immersed in projects, assignments, and academic reading requirements, I never had much time to devote to it.  Eventually it came to take up space in a box from which it was retrieved only a few months ago after saying an at least temporary farewell to the photography program to which I have been a part for the past three years.  The emphasis there was on conceptual practice, photography work that is planned, preconceived, and placed within an appropriate academic context.  Such work is rarely devoted to discovering the sensorium, but is instead devoted to depicting how one conceives the sensorium.  There might be some disconnect, some disjuncture between one’s concept and what one was able to depict, and to that degree there might be room for discovery, but the work proceeds from the idea that the sensorium is best understood through concept rather than experience.  Given that this kind of practice takes place within an academic context, a world that trades on words and ideas, it is difficult to see how it could be otherwise.  

This book - and others like it - offers an approach that seeks to connect to the experience of the sensorium before it is overlaid with words and ideas, of discovering life in its most essential form. To do this requires giving up the need for stimulation - for entertainment - and learning to relax the mind, the practice of patience and returning one’s attention to the unfolding of experience.  The method described here is not confined to photographic practice, but is available in all places and at all times to those who begin with the intention to see clearly.  By learning to do so, the mind is freed from expectations and learns to experience the world afresh, as it appears before layered with words and ideas. “Seeing things as they are is also accepting them as they are, which leads to appreciating them as they are.”  

And what more could we possibly ask from photography?  

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Contemplative Photography: Chapter 17: Equality

View of Sharjah from Twar

There are no further exercises and the book concludes with a brief recapitulation of the essence of contemplative photography.  The authors are emphatic that CP is not a style or subject, but a method of seeing.  As such, anything that can be seen is a suitable subject.  “It is not what you shoot, but how you shoot it.”  The point of departure is nonconceptual vs conceptual.  The former is CP, the attempt to depict a discovery, where the latter seeks to mine the visual field for a preconceived idea.  [This contrast - and the college’s dependence on a conceptual approach - is the primary reason I have put aside formal photography education.]

Contemplative Photography: Chapter 16: Seeing Space

“By its very nature, space is the most nonconceptual photographic intention we can work with because it is difficult to solidify or overlay ideas or associations.”

The stereotypical concept of space is sky, the vastness of the desert, the rolling breadth of oceans, the inky expanse of “outer” space.  There are of course other kinds of space:  that tiny gap between my car and the parking deck wall, the space between a child’s front teeth, the space between words.  There’s even a space bar on the keyboard.

A Google search reveals the following:

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.

Contemplative Photography: Chapters 12, 13, and 15: Joining Mind and Eye -and- Forming the Equivalent I and II

Chapter 12: Joining Mind and Eye 
We are not typically aware of our entire range of vision. When we walk into a room, we don’t notice all detail equally.  The mind picks out items within visual range on which to focus.  Knowing how awareness operates can improve the ability to see and make better images.  A camera-less exercise follows which requires fixing the gaze on one spot while moving awareness around within the visual field.  That is, moving awareness into the periphery without moving the eyes.  When doing this I found my awareness creating an almost physical feeling of pulling on the gaze.  When awareness moved top left, for example, I felt the mind pulling me to move my gaze in that direction.  It was not difficult to resist, but it was very noticeable. By slightly relaxing the intensity of the gaze, more of the periphery fell into sharper focus and became part of a bigger picture.  Increasing the intensity of the gaze reduced peripheral sharpness.

Contemplative Photography: Chapter 11: Simplicity

The chapter begins by noting the complexity and busyness of everyday life but reminding us that it is in fact impossible to do more than one thing at a time and that there is no time but now. This segues into an exercise in form. The approach here differs from others I’ve seen in emphasizing the importance of space in defining form. The authors’ relate that their students sometimes refer to this exercise as sticks in space. Many of the examples feature an item clearly isolated against a monocolor background, a technique that may evoke Japanese aesthetics, such as a large rock in a garden of manicured pebbles.

Contemplative Photography: Chapter 10: Discernment

classroom window

The point of this chapter seems to be to encourage the practitioner to slow down, to not rush the act of image making, but to rest in the moment of the flash, building discernment and understanding what it was that captured attention.

“The key to maintaining the contemplative state of mind is recognizing the many impulses toward nonresting that come up.”   Such distractions amount largely to thinking about what was seen or thinking about how to make an image, rather than just resting in the vision and questioning oneself about what precisely led to the arrest of one’s internal chatter.

This rather brief chapter includes a camera-less exercise, Looking Deeply, which requires sitting in a chair in the middle of a room with a window and slowly investigating all the visual elements - color, texture, form, light.  The purpose here seems to be to train the mind to slow down and pay attention to detail. The authors conclude with the simile of the lute, here a violin, of tuning the strings not too loose and not too tight.

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Exploring Texture 2

The authors of the text warn against shooting patterns, but isn't that exactly what texture is?   Everything has texture, but our experience is relative to size. A piece of glass feels smooth, for example, but under intense magnification is sharp and uneven. The authors of the text note that shooting texture requires getting in close. But how close?

Here are some examples from a recent outing. The image of the leaf is of interest because though it appears to be ribbed, it is in fact quite smooth to the touch.

Contemplative Photography: Chapter 9: Exploring Texture

The authors claim we conceive of texture as largely smooth and rough.  I hadn’t previously considered this, but it seems true.  I did a search for adjectives of texture and found a long list containing many words only loosely related, like angular, dreary, or dull.  Texture, it seems, should describe what something feels like.  Some words that seem relevant are included below.  (Unfortunately, blogger doesn’t allow columned text.)  Most of these could be categorized as varieties of smooth and rough, even adjectives related to the presence or absence of moisture, such as wet and dry.

Contemplative Photography Chapter 8: The Flash of Perception (Exercise: The Human Camera)

The authors attempt a slightly more detailed definition, beginning with two examples.  In the first we see someone we know and recognize something has changed, but can’t figure out what.  In the second, while looking in a restaurant window at people having their meals, our vision shifts to reflection in the glass.  In the first, we are so occupied with our concepts that we cannot properly see;  in the second, we break through conception so that seeing and mind are aligned.  This can occur, they claim, only when there is a gap in the thinking process.  This happens quite frequently and just as frequently we don’t notice.  But we can train ourselves to be attentive and to rest in those moments and thereby extend the experience.

The flash of perception is ...