Long time readers will know that I am moderately obsessed with various ideas around the notion of "being present" in, perhaps, a Zen Buddhist way, or in the quasi-religious practices of various first nations like the Navajo concept of the "smooth mind" and the Polynesian navigators. These are all variations on the theme of dismissing thoughts concerned with the past, the future, with externalities, in order to focus on the here and now.
Miksang, the zen photography technique, is recognizably just weaponizing the methods of zen walking meditation to the purpose of photography, and examples of it lay bare the essential problem here, about which I will have more to say shortly.
I firmly believe that something like these methods is necessary to take good individual pictures with any sort of reliability. In rough terms, you need to see what is truly there in order to make a good picture of it, and in order for that to happen you have to be exquisitely present. So, something that stills your interior monologues, that centers you in the here and now, is more or less a necessary technique.
The problem that most work produced through the methods of miksang makes so clear is that the pictures are not connected to anything, and are largely vacuous exercises in form.
The wonder of photography is that it is real. The photograph selects an instant in time and a little window on the world, but when we look at the photo of the tree, we believe in the forest just outside the frame profoundly, because the forest just outside the frame was actually there. Photography's power, as photography rather than simply as any old picture-making method, comes precisely from this reality, from that forest just outside the frame and from the events that occurred just before and just after the shutter snapped open for an instant.
In order to make powerful photographs, or collections of photographs, it is this power that we must use, because it is the lone tool that is in the box, ultimately.
If your ambition extends no further than to make visually striking photographs, well, more power to you and you probably need read no further. If, like me, your ambition extends further, to do more with your pictures, I may have something for you.
Indulge me and allow me to use the word "story" very broadly in this piece. Perhaps it's a literal, linear, story you want to tell. Or a series of facts and situations. But perhaps instead you have in mind something larger than a visual appeal, but ineffable, something you cannot even put in to words. A feeling, a sensation, a non-verbal gestalt of ideas and emotion. Call this larger purpose, whatever it is, the "story."
The story is carried by the interconnections of your photographs, with one another and with the world they imply. Photography's strength is in those connections, drawn from the underlying reality from which the photos are snatched. Even if your story is a marketing campaign, that is still a real car, a real model, with a real half-smile playing across her lips. While she may not truly love the car, her reality makes it easier for you to visualize yourself at her side, one hand on the car door, and keys in the other. If you're telling a gritty story of war and violence, that is a real gun, that is a real fire, that is a real bomb crater or at least a real hole. And so on.
In order to make these pictures, you have to be aware of the larger story and the world into which it is embedded. You cannot simply be lost in this instant, this moment. You cannot just wander the streets, amnesiac, drifting contemplatively from moment to moment, and construct a story. Or at least, I don't see how that would work. You need to retain the context, at least roughly, of what you are trying to accomplish.
The story may change as you work on it, of course. It is organic, it grows, shrinks, and changes form up to the very last moment when ink hits paper. But present it must be in order to inform, to direct, the photography.
And this, truly, is the dilemma. In order to make photographs, we must be simultaneously deeply aware of the forest, and be completely oblivious to the forest.
This post really resonates with me and my thoughts and experiences and things I've learned about myself and my photography over the last couple of years.
ReplyDelete"You cannot just wander the streets, amnesiac, drifting contemplatively from moment to moment, and construct a story."
I think you can. At least for how I tend to recently approach my work and the type of work I am now doing, I know that my subconscious mind is always on the lookout for the things I am interested in in my work, both thematic and visual. If I'm attracted to certain ideas and themes, I'm certainly noticing them in the world, but often only on lower levels of conciousness.
When I am out with my camera and able to get in the zone, into that state of 'flow', more often than not I manage to fill in some pieces of the larger puzzle of the various threads of work I'm preoccupied with at any given point in time. I simply work to 'still my mind', just as you mentioned, and simply try to be in the world, and recognize when I am connecting in some way with whatever I come across, and make photographs. As Henry Wessel once said 'if something attracts my attention for any reason that's good enough reason as any to take a photo'.
So, ultimately, the key for me has been in trying to empty my mind from the usual thoughts that cloud my mind so that I can actually be aware when something IS attracting my attention, which, as a matter of habit, my concious mind usually does its best to ignore unless the thing vying for my attention might be life threatening.
Ruminating on the meaning, for me, comes later, as I reflect on what i've photographed, and how if fits with other stuff I've done and am doing, and thoughts and ideas that have been preoccupying me. Connections start to assert themselves. My various 'projects' grow over time, and new ones start to form, new ideas start to make themselves known, and the process continues onward.
I believe that it could be interesting to compare Miksang photography to Haiku poetry. The latter is also founded in the Zen tradition. A good Haiku is supposed to originate from mindful observation of your surroundings; in the so-called "Haiku moment", the poet observes something which points at something profoundly deep in the Buddhist tradition - for example, that could be the impermanence of all things being, and the resulting compassion (mono-no-aware). The Haiku should express this solely through the description of the observed, without resorting to metaphor. Probably the originators of Miksang photography employed the same mechanism. It should be noted that these people had a comprehensive training in Buddhist philosophy, like the early practitioners of Haiku poetry. If, however, this approach is employed only as a process, the result will be a bunch of tropes - in Miksang photography as well as with contemporary Haiku.
ReplyDeleteI do believe, however, that mindfulness can be put to good use - in that your "Haiku moment" points you to your story instead of Buddhist philosophy (which, admittedly, is hard for us westerners to "get").
Best, Thomas
"Even if your story is a marketing campaign, that is still a real car, a real model, with a real half-smile playing across her lips. While she may not truly love the car, her reality makes it easier for you to visualize yourself at her side, one hand on the car door, and keys in the other.”
ReplyDeleteI'm having a hard time connecting the above with "the wonder of photography is that it is real" - are you able to elucidate (tell me to go back to the post if you think it is as clear as you can make it!)? We skim past such adverts on Instagram or in a magazine because they aren't real, they're manufactured, with ersatz emotion, too perfect - humans are hard wired to at least try and tell truth from fiction and we (think we) know if an artist, a photographer, is telling us their truth because they speak directly to us even though they are talking to themselves.
Truth arrests us. And for this to work the photograph needs to leave us some space to bring our own agenda - to paraphrase Crewdson, when confronted with a good (interesting?) photograph, we don't look at it, we look through it at something else. Confronted with a big-haired, dazzling-smiled model with a car, we're left with nowhere to go but "oh, an advert" and we know what the agenda is. Even if an advert surprises and delights us it is still fatally undermined by the fact that it is trying to tell us what to think - buy this, go there, do that, spend X amount. Whilst an artist is perhaps trying to sell you something - the piece itself maybe - a good artist is really talking to herself, not to a marketing group or a campaign manager. In what could otherwise by a solely solipsistic act, the artist may or may not snare us with an intriguing or new vision, a new way of seeing something, or highlighting something you’d always known but never before seen articulated. But whatever else is the case, in doing so, in snaring us, one ingredient they cannot leave out is (a perceived) truth.
Hollowness will out.
Well, sure, a photo of a model standing next to a BMW is pretty shabby. Still, there's a reason they use a photo and not a drawing.
DeleteAdvertising works better than we think it does!
I completely agree with Paul. I also agree with Andrew's comment. Let me explain.
ReplyDeleteI'm a "graduate" of the Miksang school from many years ago, and mentioned Miksang to him a couple of years ago. I fully agree with Andrew's comment that the Miksang credo tends to produce " ... pictures not connected to anything, and are largely vacuous exercises in form."
BUT, and this is a big BUT, that's only true if you adhere to the Miksang way of doing things.
To again quote Andrew ... "you need to see what is truly there in order to make a good picture of it, and in order for that to happen you have to be exquisitely present. So, something that stills your interior monologues, that centers you in the here and now, is more or less a necessary technique." This is what Miksang does probably better than any photographic "discipline"; It teaches you how to SEE. But seeing is not photographing. The problem with Miksang emerges when you stick to their rules of HOW to photograph what you see. I view Miksang as just another tool in my photographic tool kit and photograph the way I want, a lot of it in BW which is completely against the Miksang rules. Approached that way it is a very useful and powerful tool.
If you meet the Buddha on the road, kill him.
ReplyDelete