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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