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.
