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.

Notes: Bate, D. (2009). Photography: The Key Concepts. Oxford: Berg.

This book is part of a series designed for students from Berg Press covering key concepts in the Humanities and Social Sciences, including volumes on Media, Technoculture, Food, Globalization, The Body, and Film.  Regarding the author, I pulled the following from his page at the University of Westminster, London:

David Bate [is] a practicing photo-artist. He studied Photography and Film, art history and cultural theory. He received a Doctorate in the Fine Art Department at the University of Leeds in 1999. Currently Professor of Photography, he leads the MA Photographic Studies programme at the University and is also director of its Photography Research Group. He teaches practice and theory mainly to postgraduate students and supervises doctoral student work. He was co-founder of Accident and Five Years Gallery in London, and is co-editor and co-founder of the academic journal photographies since 2008.

As described in the Introduction, Bate organizes the text around the concept of genre, a concept he finds underrepresented in photographic studies.  He defines genre as an expectation generating process, in the case of photography a kind of visual schemata, each with different functions that are often likely to overlap.  In other words, it’s a system for categorization with fuzzy boundaries. No surprise here.  What is of more interest is apart from documentary, photographic genres have been borrowed from painting.  The text is thereafter organized into eight chapters, the first two covering history and theory, followed by documentary, portraiture,  landscape,  still life, art, and world photography.