Contemplative Photoraphy - Upaya Zen Center · Contemplative Photography Contemplative Photography: Expanding Your Vision We begin as children seeing the world as a mystery. The mind

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Contemplative Photoraphy

©Copyright 2007george DeWolfe


What is important is our insight into the nature of reality and our way of responding to reality

Thich Nhat Hanh


Reality is simply the present moment

Alan Watts

Beauty is simply reality itself

Thomas Merton


To accept the present moment

of reality before us is

the greatest act of faith

we will ever perform.

Life, filled only with moments,

is a life of faith.


Contemplative Photography: Expanding Your Vision

We begin as children seeing the world as a mystery. The mind absorbs and reflects the experiences of youth as a stainless mirror, and continually adds them to the knowledge bank of neurons. These stored memories combine and create another world, the conceptual world, where ideas and unlikely combinations of invisible elements stir constantly in the alembic of the mind. Somewhere along the road to adulthood, the mind accepts this other conceptual world as the real one. It is the purpose of Contemplation to return us to the world of the real, and the role of Contemplative Photography is to express it. Contemplative Photography is where a calm and aware mind unites with the primary elements of human vision. It is the clear visual expression of reality.

Contemplation is paying attention, right now, wherever you are. Contemplation notices things that cannot be accessed by language. It allows us to be calm and aware of our events and surroundings. Contemplation is neither frivolous nor spiritual. It is human. It is a skill. It is a choice. Thomas Merton called it, “…the direct intuition of reality…a direct grasp of the unity of the visible and the invisible…a plain fact, a pure experience, the very foundation of our being and thought.””

When practiced skillfully and over time, contemplation can attenuate or even cure most human mental cares such as fear, anxiety, desire and stress – cares that begin with the conceptualizing nature of the human mind. When practiced in conjunction with art, it is one of the highest, and yet paradoxically one of the humblest, expressions of human life. It is seeing like a child, in mystery.

Contemplative Photography is just such a practice. It combines the practice of seeing with the age-old practice of mindfulness. Rather than just seeing like we do most of the time, dualistically and conceptually bound, we see calmly and are totally aware of what is in front of us in the moment. We see objects and relationships as one with no preconceived conceptual baggage.–Contemplative Photography proceeds from the correct perception of reality to the clear expression of it. It is different from other types of photography in that it demands nothing from us and nothing from the object. It is an expression of the pure visual nature of reality as it unfolds in front of us in the moment. Learning Contemplative Photography requires that we tear down the conceptual edifice that was unknowingly created from infancy by our culture and reconstruct a new one: a mind that is calm and a vision that is aware.


What is a Masterpiece?

Whenever I visit a museum there is a game I play. Because it is impossible to see all the exhibits and appreciate them all in one day, I go with an agenda. Ten years ago I had a day to burn in Washington and went to the National Gallery. The agenda, knowing that the National had such a large collection of portraits, was to determine, for myself, who the greatest portrait painter in history was. At the end of the day I had picked nine painters who I thought might be contenders for the prize: Rembrandt, of course, with his luminous and mystical images of ordinary people; Rubens, who painted human lustiness like know one else; And Renoir, whose women are so compelling and beautiful. But it was one other that caught my eye and made me sit down and look. And, as I sat in front of the life-size portraits of Anthony VanDyke, I felt a presence that did not exist in the others. The people he painted leapt off the canvas and became real.

It was under such a pretense that photography began: to depict the presence of reality. Painters like VanDyke produced works that appeared to be “super-real,” even over or under-exaggerating form and color, but yet still lay grounded in what is called “The Faithful Image,” a one-to-one correlation between what is represented and the representation itself. Photography accomplished that representational correlation to a precise (but


not exact) degree, and so accurately that it was considered the visual “truth.” As a result painters, from the middle part of the 19th century, went looking for reality in other places: Impressionism, Cubism, Abstract Expressionism, and, in the latter 20th century, a Postmodern sensibility that derives its pleasure from a lack of form altogether and a reliance almost totally on conceptual content. In the midst of all these movements photography also wanted to be accepted as an artform, but, in order to do so, was asked to relinquish (at least partially), in the mid-1970’s, it’s strong suit of depicting the real world for a “patch” job, the combining of many images into one, and joined the rest of the art world in the conceptual box canyon it had ridden the dusty trail into. With the advent of digital imaging we are now presented with a “Virtual Reality” world where everything is decidedly conceptual and “almost” real. Of course, this is all a long story made very short.

Photography (Imaging) has come to be synonymous with word Photoshop, the industry standard digital image editing and manipulation software. This as both a blessing and a curse. It is a curse because it promotes, willy-nilly, the compositing of images, the mixing and matching of many images into one - a montage, a “patch” job. The height of this outrageous image manipulation exists in


the pages of a well-known national tabloid, where we are led to believe, absolutely, the ultimate absurdity - that what is false is true. In addition, it fosters the idea that conceptual “Virtual Reality” is a replacement for the real, and may, indeed, be superior to it. Other than the fact that this might be inherently dangerous, the one consistent observation I have about “Virtual Reality” is that it lacks real presence.

On the other hand, Photoshop, in its most important, yet least understood role, allows us to take a digitized image and give it the presence we saw during the moment of photographing. It is better at this one task than any darkroom technique ever known. This idea came to me only gradually, through experience, working with both traditional and digital photography.

Photoshop is an image editing software program made by Adobe Systems and is part of the “closed-loop” lightroom digital workflow that begins with an input image from a digital camera or scanner, is transferred to a computer where Photoshop resides and works, and finally, the finished image is output to a digital printer. The quality, control, and archival nature of this output are now superior to any traditional photographic technology. Furthermore - and this is the most important


point - the image seems more real than it did with traditional media.

I started to notice this difference eight years ago when photographing jewelry. The metallic gold and silver color and “substance” was retained better in a digital image than with the traditional color transparency. Gems seemed more lifelike and sparkled off the screen, as they never did before. I then began to find, with the output from the new Epson photo printers in the late 1990’s that the printed image appeared more alive, more real, and more full of life. I began making color and Black & White prints that equaled the tonal range of silver and dye prints, but the realism of the digital print was superior. I began to ask why, and the answer slowly, but effectively, arose from the very foundation of photography itself - Light.

In both B&W and Color we now have at our command, in Photoshop, complete control of the light in an image. Before, with traditional media, our control was limited to a minimum - burning, dodging, paper grade changes, fill, and negative development. But the two great bugaboos of the traditional darkroom - local contrast and desaturated highlight and shadow colors - were barely solvable only by the few willing to master the difficult techniques of masking and Dye Transfer.

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The control of these difficult light problems is literally at your fingertips in Photoshop and the digital workflow.

In Photoshop we now have complete control over local contrast. We can manipulate the contrast of any area of a photograph down to the pixel level. We can show differences in the separation of light values from 1% off-white to 0% paper base and from 99% gray to 100% black ink. If this isn’t enough, we can also control the ambient sense of the overall feeling of the light as it interpenetrates the whole. In color, we can control precisely the chroma (saturation) of highlight and shadow colors, making them more vivid and real than the unforgiving white highlights and black shadows we had with traditional media.

A masterpiece is, above all, the creation of an individual artist's genius. This suggests that an individual authentic response to the world is one of the main aspects of this genius. Authenticity is different from originality. Originality is the desire to do something different. Authenticity is the desire to be yourself. Finding this authenticity requires that the artist have a desire for wholeness in the world, that things have a pattern or a unified place from which he can speak. Wholeness and an authentic individual response to this wholeness leads to what

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might be called Presence. Presence is the subject the artist has chosen, represented by the artist's authentic response, and driven into wholeness by the artist with craft and skill in the finished work. This is a Masterpiece - determined by the very heart and soul of the artist and his relationship to the world. The process is life-long, it's manifestation nearly impossible, and centered on wholeness with the world.

If we look at the history of photography and the great pictures it has given us, it is truly the honesty of the light that has held the whole together and made the moment seem real. Luminosity creates our world as photographers. It is the light that ultimately produces presence, in the portraits of Anthony VanDyke or in the field beyond your door.


Wholenness


Two roads diverged in a yellow wood,

And sorry I could not travel both

And be one traveler, long I stood

And looked down one as far as I could

To where it bent in the undergrowth;

Then took the other, as just as fair,

And having perhaps the better claim,

Because it was grassy and wanted wear;

Though as for that the passing there

Had worn them really about the same,

And both that morning equally lay

In leaves no step had trodden black.

Oh, I kept the first for another day!

Yet knowing how way leads on to way,

I doubted if I should ever come back.

I shall be telling this with a sigh

Somewhere ages and ages hence:

Two roads diverged in a wood, and I,

I took the one less traveled by,

And that has made all the difference.

Robert Frost


Radical Acceptance

Suppose we really don’t know what Reality is. What is our next step?

Accept the moment in front of us

Acceptance is a CHOICE – Accept/Deny - Robert Frost

Acceptance is not judging

Acceptance is a commitment (over and over again)

Acceptance is acknowledging What Is

Acceptance leads to a positive authentic response

If you do not accept, you cannot see (non-acceptance is illusion)

Denial is the root of evil


MindfulnessStill photography is the visual capturing of a mo-ment. The study of a moment is the discipline of mindfulness, an ancient practice that allows us to see the present moment non-judgmentally, on purpose. Mindfulness brings us greater awareness, clarity, acceptance, and mental calm. It allows us to see the true nature of a moment, to see reality truly, to penetrate from the actual world of the senses to the mysterious world of intuition and the spirit. It does this by allowing our true percep-tual sense to come to the fore and allows all our concepts and expectations of things to pass away. It literally allows the mind to become clear.

Imagine a picture of a tree and its reflection in a pool of water. The tree is reality and our mind is the pool. When waves occur on the pool, we can-not see the tree clearly, as when words, thoughts, concepts, desires, and attachments cause our minds to be turbulent and we cannot see reality clearly (which is most of the time). When the pool is calm, we can see the tree clearly, just as when our mind is clear of concepts and desires, we can see reality clearly. Mindfulness causes the pool of the mind to become mirror-like, so that it can reflect reality. It is seeing truly. It is seeing what is.


Mindfulness puts you on an intuitive path, calms your mind, and makes you aware of what is in front of you at that very moment. It makes the mind an empty vessel, ready to receive new and pure experience. It is indeed the philosophy of a moment, which is what we photograph.

So how do we recognize this feeling of mystery accessed by Mindfulness so that we can take the meaningful photographs that fill our lives with peaceful joy and tranquility? My first experience with this was to sit quietly in front of a sea shell and practice Mindfulness. The shell, in that mo-ment, seemed to glow with a slight iridescence that was greater than before. Notice any change like this in the object– shape, outline, or tonal value, no matter how small. This is an indication that the subject is not really changing, but that your vision is changing to see reality purely, as it is.

Another “tell” is the tension in yourself that “tells” you when and when not to take a picture. I have found that when the “tell” leads me away from the image, or ”tells” me not to take it, that this is an indication of an important change in my vision about reality, and I go ahead and make the picture anyway, even if I can’t see anything visible that’s interesting, or something that I would normally photograph. Trust this sense – it is your intuition and Mindfulness at work at its best.


Choose a comfortable, alert position. Sit quietly, close your eyes.

Focus your attention on your breath. Keep your attention on the rim of your nostrils watching the cool air come in and the warm air go out.

Ignore any thought, memory or sound, smell or taste. Focus your attention on your nostrils and nothing else.

If you notice your mind drifting with a thought, calmly acknowledge the thought, let it pass, and bring your focus mindfully back to the breath.

Practice for 15 -30 minutes a day for 2 weeks. You should see a definite improvement in your calmness of mind and awareness of reality. The effect is cumulative: the more you practice mind-fulness, the more it calms the mind, the more you see truly. When the mind is united with the breath, we are able to fuse inside and outside into one, and with focused mind on the present moment, unlim-ited possibilities for expression of that moment through photography abound.

Basic Mindfulness

What changes is that we no longer see incorrectly


Luminosity


Why Luminosity Is Important

Luminosity is represented in a photograph by tones of black, white, and gray. Luminosity is light. It represents all that we can see about the world we photograph. Every object, event, and mood depends upon visible light represented by luminosity in the photograph.

Luminosity is important to visualize when we are taking a picture, when we are transforming it in Photoshop, when we calibrate our monitor, and when we print. Because of the nature of visual perception, hue and saturation are processed separately from luminosity in our brains, and we must forcibly separate luminosity and train ourselves to see it to accomplish the quality we desire in a digital fine print. A good print starts with seeing the luminosity of a scene and ends with it.

The photograph of the Matterhorn (Figures 1 and 2) was made when I was 19 years old in 1964 with a Kodak Instamatic camera. This photograph has been one of my greatest teachers. I have kept it by my bedside for years and I’ve learned more about photography and the world from it than all the hundreds of books or teachers or photographs I’ve known. It’s largely important because I made it before I knew anything at all about photography or f/stops or film speeds or great photographers.

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It is pristine vision. The camera was the cheapest Instamatic Kodak made (about $10, if I remember correctly). The film came in a cartridge that you dropped in and the image size was 1 inch by 1 inch. I knew at the instant I snapped the shutter that the photograph was a good one, at least visually. I have spent over four decades trying to figure out why, and I have learned much. One of the most important of those things I’ve learned is about light and how to photograph it. That morning, looking at the Matterhorn, I discovered luminosity.

The light in this photograph has always been special to me, and I continually want to know why. The light seems to be a part of the scene and yet not part of it. How do we see this and how do we, metaphorically, put ourselves in the path of its beam? The answer, for me, came from the aesthetic interpretation of two concepts that describe light: ambient light and reflected light.

Ambient light is the light from a light source (in this case the Sun) that falls upon the subject we are photographing. Reflected light is the light reflected from the subject (in this case the Matterhorn) we are photographing. The quality of both these types of light is seen and represented differently in the black and white luminous tones of a photograph. Here


is what two great men have written about this peculiar phenomenon: From the 1978 Polaroid Annual Report:Dr. Edwin Land:“… the photograph is two entirely different kinds of report transmitted to us by what appear to be mixed languages, the language for delineating objects and the language for displaying illumination.

There have not been many great photographers in history, but the great ones usually turn out to be masters of the vocabulary of these two utterly different languages in black and white photography. For most would-be photographers these languages are mixed together and never disentangle, like the babble of voices at a cocktail party. The breathtaking competence of the great photographer is to cause the object of his choice to be revealed with symphonic grandeur, meticulous in detail, majestic in illumination.”

From Natural Light Photography (1952):Ansel Adams:“Light, to the accomplished photographer, is as much an actuality as is substance such as rock and flesh; it is an element to be evaluated and interpreted. The impression of light and the impression of substance which are achieved through the careful use of light are


equally essential to the realistic photographic image…To utilize it (natural outdoor light) fully you must know how to evaluate its intensities and qualities, not only in their effect on sensitive emulsions, but also in relation to the intangible elements of insight and emotion that are expressed in a good photograph. A certain esthetic philosophy is involved; something more than the physical conditions of light and exposure…the chief problem is to preserve the illusion of light falling upon the subject. A print intended to convey an emotional impression might differ from a normal photographic record.”

Both Land and Adams are talking here about the same thing. They are talking in general terms about the two types of light that a photographer has to deal with: the light reflecting from a subject (reflected light) that causes its texture and form and the light falling on the subject (ambient light) that causes the overall “mood” or aesthetic character of the image. The quality of light both reflected from the object and the ambient illumination falling on the entire scene are represented in the photographic print by luminosity alone.


Visualizing Luminosity

Taking time to visualize and control the luminosity in a photograph will pay rich rewards in the print. The first tool that I use for this purpose is an item borrowed from traditional photography that helped photographers visualize a scene in black and white before taking the picture - a Kodak Wratten 90 monochromatic viewing filter as shown in Figure. Next to it is the Tiffen Black & White Viewing filter - the same filter, just in a fancier (and handier) - viewer. The filter itself is amber, but it cancels out color and turns the world into a monochromatic view that shows the contrast relationships and tonal mergers that will occur in black and white photographs. This filter is also used extensively in the motion picture industry for the same purpose. The "90" helps us to see a world that we have trouble visualizing. It is available in many forms, from the original Kodak gel to the specially made viewers by Tiffen. (Figures 3 and 4)

When I study the scene in front of me for luminosity using this filter, all I have to do, if I like what I see through it, is, in Photoshop, draw the saturation slider in Adobe Camera Raw to -100 (which desaturates the image and shows only the luminosity. Note: In Photoshop CS3 and Lightroom I simply

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press the Grayscale button) and I'll usually achieve a decent black and white (luminosity) image right off the bat. After getting a good luminosity image (by further refinement in Camera Raw or Lightroom, if necessary), I either keep it that way for a black and white print, or convert it back to color. With this simple tool and correction, we see that luminosity is the key to controlling many important things in the image: Color, shadow detail, highlight detail, midtone separation, and tonal blending in the image.In Figure 5 we see the original color scene, in the middle photograph Figure 6 we see the image with the 90 viewing filter, and the final photograph Figure 7 shows it converted into black and white. The viewing filter subtracts most of the color from the image and we view it in monotone, helping us to see the possibilities of the luminosity.

Seeing and Controlling Luminosity in Photoshop

While it is relatively easy to see the reflected light from the surfaces of objects and control them with local burning and dodging in Lightroom and Photoshop, ambient light is quite another matter. As is hinted by the quotes from Adams and Land, both are important for the “presence” of a good

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photograph and print, in both color and black and white.

The struggle to find a method to reveal ambient light started for me over ten years ago. Through the work of Adams and realistic painters I discovered that there exists in each photograph a web of light that represents the ambient “glue” that holds the feeling of the image together and allows it to unify. In reality it is a web of light that creates wholeness to the image.

Photoshop has a very good tool to identify and modify this “web of light” in a photograph – Color Range in the Filter Menu. To find this web in an image I open Color Range and look at the Highlights, Midtones, and Shadows as separate areas. The one that has a web of light that covers most of the image (it could be in one or all three areas), is then chosen using the Color Range command, which turns that area into a selection that can be manipulated with Curves or Levels or other necessary tools. The following examples show an image in various stages of diagnosing where the web of light exists, what needs to be done to enhance the web, and the final photograph showing the result. (Figures 8 & 9). Notice how the highlights and the midtones show a web throughout the image and the shadows do not. I increased the contrast in both the


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midtones and the highlights using the Color Range selections to achieve the final adjusted image.

A photograph usually contains both ambient and reflected light, but one will usually dominate the other. Think of reflected light as defining an object and ambient light as a feeling. Absolutely defining such aesthetic truths is impossible. By engaging ourselves in this discovery process, we see that luminosity has meaning. There is a visual vocabulary of tonal value caused by luminosity in black and white and color photographs that is created by the action of light alone, independent of content. The answers to any questions about luminosity must be treated as a continually unsolved riddle that always changes and that offers us endless possibilities for an authentic response of expression in a photograph.


Shape


Shape and Space

One of the things I observe in people learning to see is that they are visually attached to shapes. This is hardwired in the visual cortex of the brain. But cameras don’t just see shapes. Cameras also see the space around the shapes, so that a photograph is a dual representation of what artists call Negative space and Positive shape. Psychologists call this phenomenon Figure/Ground, where the figure is the positive shape and the ground(background) is the negative space. The camera sees both of these equally, but most new photographers see only the shape. Because of this we have to learn how to see the negative space as well as the positive shape to give harmony and balance to the image. It is part of the process of learning to see reality.

Looking at the negative space surrounding a shape makes it easier to see the overall harmony of a picture. There are three ways to see how the camera sees this, easily. One is to use a 35mm slide mount and compose the picture through it rather than through the viewfinder of the camera, trying to see the negative spaces only. Another is to smear a thin coat of Vaseline on a piece of clear packing tape, paste it to the viewfinder and see general fuzzy shapes and spaces in the viewfinder, but detailed images on the negative


when it is developed, dominated by the shapes and spaces you saw. Lastly, take the 35mm slide mount and a watercolor marker, stand facing a window, hold the slide mount up to your eye, and draw on the window exactly what you see outdoors.

“Reality,” writes Ray Grigg,” is often contrary to appearances.” Why are we so attached to shape that it takes exercise and practice to see all of visual reality, including the space around it?

Because of its hardwired nature in the brain, seeing just shape(or figure) alone is contrary to seeing what exists. When we see shape we see appearance, because the brain is “running home to mama.” But when we see shape and space together(photographically speaking), we see reality as it is. The act of defying what the brain actually does, in the visual sense, allows us to see shape and space correctly. This is the major reason we have difficulty in seeing the world as it is photographically. We have to overcome what we already think is real.

In order for us to see something, it must exist. This is not the dualistic existence of René Décartes, the cogito ergo sum, I think therefore I am. Rocks, according to this statement, do not exist, because they don’t think. But, indeed, rocks do exist. We see them, they change.


They appear as shapes, coming from nowhere, then disappearing after millennia into dust and nothingness. We do not see this. Our surface sense of seeing(the hardwired one) attaches to the object as if grasping for it and cannot let go. When we grasp at something, we can see nothing else. It causes suffering. Similarly, when this object changes, we suffer because of the loss of the object seen. This is repeated thousands of times daily to photographers of all persuasions. Wilber Wright’s reaction to the first flight of the airplane in 1903 was to turn around and yell at the photographer, “Did you get the picture?!” How many photographs has each of us lost because we were trying too hard, grasping to get the fleeting last light of momentary existence? In the most profound and mysterious of ways, something arises out of nothing, positive shape is created from negative space. When you reach the point where you can not only see, but feel this phenomenon, you have gone a long way in learning to let go, to stop grasping, to see truly.

Let’s look for a moment at the accompanying photographs, one a straightforward example of negative space and positive shape, the other a deep and provocative image where the shapes and spaces are hidden. The corn plant shows the black background and positive shapes clearly. While it took months of looking,


catching the light just right, and finding the precise viewpoint, the play of shape and space is marvelous. The photograph of the light on the bushes pushes the ralationship of space and shape further. Here there are shapes, but they are not as well defined as the corn plant. They are more subtle, and tend to bring out light and mystery. The third image of the reflection taxes space and shape to the limit, so that you have difficulty telling one from the other. It brings out the essence of what Henry Thoreau hinted when he said we must look through and beyond Nature. These images illustrate what it is possible for positive/negative space to accomplish in a photograph: one the obvious play of shape and space and the other a hidden, intuitive, and almost invisible performance.

But I hesitate. Looking for the hidden reality behind the appearances of things is a wordless and silent occupation. One can say much and overpower the experience with meaningless and uncertain phrases. It must always be the photograph that speaks to us, the visual alembic of silence and grace. A photograph can be many things. For me it will always be a probing into the hidden world behind the appearance of things that the qualities of shape and space point to. It is stepping into an autumn field to look for the meaning of existence, to find, as a great philosopher


once suggested, “the dim dream that builds a milkweed pod.”


Corn Plant

Light & Bushes

Reflection


Authentic Response


The Koans of Seeing


The KoanA koan is a riddle that has no solution in rational thought. The answer, if it can be truly called an answer, is found in the authentic intuitive response to an experience. What is required to “solve” a koan is not to copy or repeat but to respond in a full, au-thentic, and living manner to the moment. It seeks for an intuitive and comprehensive grasp of the whole. In rational terms, the koan is never solved. It is calm, quiet, undisturbable, and appears to give us a glimpse of eternity.

The Koans of Seeing are a series of visual koans that can only be responded to authentically, by the photographer, in a photograph. No thought, conceptual idea, or analytical process can solve the koan. Only an authentic photograph. An authen-tic photograph is one that is taken by you with no conceptual, cultural, contextual, or copied residual vision or thought. Authentic response is always intuitive and original.

The lessons learned from these photographic koans are many, but the most important I think is that they allow you to solve puzzles in life that have no rational answer. In a way, the koan is never solved, it is only realized. Realizing the koan is finding the center.


The Blank Wall


Listening


How Long is a Moment?


Awakening


Hidden Wholeness


The Web of Light


Seeing Through


The Unknown Color


Photography

and

The Spiritual Quest


I spent the first half of my life talking to God; I am bent on spending the last half listening.

I found that talking gets in the way. Talking intrudes into my relationship with the universe by cutting me off from it because of what I want and grasp for. But it’s not really important what I want because once I gain the object of my desire I worry about losing it. Either way I suffer. So, what I see and accept now is in the reality before me in the moment. Accepting is different than grasping: there is a calm and aware and unified sense to it. And I’ve learned that when I’m pres-ent now the world is a unity to me and not frag-mented or separate. To be whole, to be centered, to have meaning in our lives, to be at peace – this is the Spiritual Quest of old.

In order to understand this personal riddle of ex-istence, to be on a Spiritual Quest, each one of us must somehow examine reality – the true reality of ourselves and our relationship to the universe. Accomplishing this feat requires that we confront raw nature and ourselves. The great religious leaders of the past, philosophers, poets and art-ists grappled with this problem, typically, in wild places.

Photography and The Spiritual Quest

Be Still

Observe Everything

Believe Nothing


Yet, it is in the heart where the real search begins. It began, for me, oddly, with a rock in the forest.

I had come down off a long treacherous moun-tain ridge and was walking homeward through the forest. It was dusk, and specks of light dotted the brown floor here and there. A small clearing appeared a little way down the darkening trail, and seemed like a good place to rest, I told myself, after a long day with the camera. As I approached closer to the clearing I could just make out a shin-ing white rock that seemed to glow with a cool whiteness that is indescribable. Perhaps it was only my mind playing tricks with me, but I can swear the brightness grew in magnitude. A rock has no business doing this, my objective geologic sense told me. The professors in their dusty labs didn’t warn us. There were no specimens for identification I had ever come upon with which to compare it. How the photograph I made came to be an almost perfect image of that moment is a mystery to me, yet as my attention centered on the stone, something similarly inside centered itself and was formed. The craftsmanship of the camera and the inner feeling of an outward cxpresence were one: the image contained the experience.



We begin, then, unknowingly, with a plot of ground. For me it began with the rock and is composed of many other experiences: in a frost covered field, in the quiet grace of a milkweed pod, in a landscape devoid of form. I look con-tinually to renew this magical experience because somehow, mysteriously, it forms my being and relationship to all that exists. Our acceptance of these mysteries starts from such a place as a white rock glowing in a clearing and expands outward to include other parallel experiences and the entirety of our experience of reality. All I have to do is set forth across an open field and it appears before me. It is not something imaginary or invoked — it is real. This experience of reality is as old as the human race. It demands, for whatever reason, expression. The Spiritual Quest, true photog-raphy, and all art start from the same beginning: an experience of unity and oneness from an event that turns our ordinary world upside-down. We spend the rest of our lives in pursuit of and ex-pressing this Quest. This workshop deals with some of the skills involved in the Spiritual Quest, and, above all, as those skills relate to the photo-graphic expression of it.

It would be presumptuous of me to even try to tell you what is a meaningful experience for you


to capture in a photograph and even more so to presume to know your own Spiritual Quest, but it is not presumptuous for you to tell yourself. What I can relate to you about first experiences of the meaningful images in your life is that they tend to be very small, as is the way of all great things. There is this slight inclination of change in you and the subject, a feeling of subtle calm, and not elation. It is a vision of certainty, but you cannot say of what, cannot speak the words. It is timeless, childlike, unspectacular and mysterious. The emotion is one of great humility – and great interior power, of being one with the world. It is an encounter of the immediacy of visual percep-tion and the quiet serenity of a calm and aware mind. As I become older I am aware that this feeling is similar to the rustling of leaves on a fall day. Amidst this grace of the fall of leaves is a hesitancy present on the fringes of awareness. I watch and listen to them as an animal might listen to a strange sound, with my head cocked this way, then that. It is a feeling with which I have associ-ated the harbinger of the Spiritual Quest, perhaps even the herald of God himself. It is the sound of silence and beginning and hope.

I have been a mountain climber for over 40 years. There is great spiritual and physical energy in


it and we have this saying that if there are three stars shining in the sky in the morning you should start. This is a geographical statement and a spiri-tual one. It reflects an attitude about the relation-ship between the heavens, the earth and ourselves. This morning I arise softly and carefully, and take my camera and old pack from the closet. With the same curiosity that must have moved our an-cient ancestors I approach the door to my dwell-ing in silence, always silence. I look outward, but not only with my eyes, to a sky full of stars. There are few things as joyful to the heart as this: this beginning again, this wonder, this mystery.


Qualities ofThe Spiritual Quest

Be Still

Observe Everything

Believe Nothing


Photographs can create unity and expression only when they embody the silence from which they emerge. Silence opens the door to a new dimension, a secret passage, an invisible hole in the fabric of the universe. Being still creates the gate through which seeing and the camera can operate together harmoniously.

Be Still


Observe Everything

Man cannot afford to be a naturalist,to look at nature directly, but onlywith the side of his eye. He must

look through and beyond her.

Henry David Thoreau


Believe Nothing

Awareness cannot be taught, and when it is present it has no context. All contexts are

created by thought and are therefore corruptible by thought. Awareness simply

throws light on what is, without any separation whatsoever.

Toni Packer


Selected Bibliography

Barclay, William, The Mind of Jesus, San Francisco, Harper Collins, 1976.

Cheng, François, Empty and Full, The Language of Chinese Painting, Boston, Shambhala, 1994.

DeWolfe, George E., George DeWolfe's Digital Photography Fine Print Workshop, San Francisco, McGraw Hill, 2006.

Edwards, Betty, Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain, Los Angeles, Tarcher. 1999

Feng, Gia-Fu and English, Jane, Tao Te Ching, New York, Vintage Books, 1972.

Grigg, Ray, The Tao of Being, Atlanta, Humanics New Age, 1989. The Tao of Zen, Boston, Charles E. Tuttle, Inc., 1994.

Gunaratana, V.H., Mindfulness in Plain English, Boston, Wisdom Publications, 1994.

Hagen, Steve, How The World Can Be The Way It Is, Wheaton, Quest Books, 1995.

Hanh, Thich Nhat, The Miracle of Mindfulness, Boston, Beacon Press, 1976.

Herrigel, Eugen, Zen in the Art of Archery, New York, Vintage Books, 1989.

Kabat-Zinn, John, Wherever You Go There You Are, New York, Hyperion, 1994.

Livingstone, Margaret, Vision and Art, The Biology of Seeing, New York, Harry N. Abrams, 2002.

Loori, John Daido, The Zen of Creativity, Cultivating your Artistic Life, New York Ballantine Books, 2004.

Merton, Thomas, The Way of Chuang Tzu, Boston, Shambhala, 1992. Mystics and Zen Masters, New York, Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1993 Zen and the Birds of Appetite, Boston, Shambhala, 1968

Packer, Toni, The Work of This Moment, Boston, Charles E. Tuttle, Inc., 1995.

Soeng, Mu, Trust In Mind,Boston, Wisdom Publications, 2004

Suzuki, Shunryu, Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind, New York, Weatherhill,Inc, 1970 Tse, Mai Mai, The Tao of Painting , Bollingen Series, Princeton, Princeton University Press, 1959

Zeki, Semir, A Vision of the Brain, London, Blackwell Science, 1993 Inner Vision, New York, Oxford University Press, 1999


Be Still

Observe Everything

Believe Nothing

Documents

Contemplative Photoraphy - Upaya Zen Center · Contemplative Photography Contemplative Photography: Expanding Your Vision We begin as children seeing the world as a mystery. The mind