The Contemplative Eye

I like pictures I’m not sure I like.

I just finished reading Geoff Dyer’s wonderful The Ongoing Moment, an improvisatory muse suggesting there are interrelated contents and meanings in a long string of famous photos. It struck me that many of the photos didn’t interest me. I know they’re famous. I know clever people saw important stuff in them. And I know I’m just a coconut in Maine.

Nevertheless, for me, pictures like these do stay “open” in an intriguing way. They’re ambiguous (at least in my brainpan). And so I like ’em in the end.

The same thing happens when I’m clearing photo files from my computers, trying vainly to free up disk space. My wife Mary stops me and says, “No, don’t throw that one out. I like it!”—much to my surprise. Or vice versa: She has no use for something I adore and reckons I could chuck it.

As the wielder of the Delete button, I tend to decide I “like” all those pictures—as useful jolts of ambiguity—and keep them.

I’m not a social documentarian shooting sharecroppers. Nor a commercial photographer shooting wedding portraits and landscapes. Nor a photojournalist shooting war crimes. Nor an art photographer shooting the postmodern world. Or anything else I can think of. So maybe it’s no wonder I’m not too interested, at first, in most other photos.

I’m a contemplative photographer. I try to shoot things that catch my eye and create suspended-in-midair ambiguities in our usual, conceptual ways of seeing. Many of my pictures are abstract-ish (like those of certain art photographers), but that’s beside the point.

The picture you see here, then, is a double-reverse experiment on myself: I don’t like it much, but I posted it anyway and watched myself start writing.

I see it’s an abstract. Sort of. But there’s not much ambiguity to “stop the mind.” And the actual things shown in the image—which never interest me—aren’t interesting by (as far as I know) any standard.

And then I showed it to Mary.

[Above: Along Fore Street in Portland, Maine. Loopy experimental result: Mary liked it. She liked the composition, textures, and energy, saying they gave her a lot of choices about where to go with it. Yahtzee!]

About a year ago, my friend Dave the photographer told me to stop shooting Maine waterfronts because I was repeating myself.

He was right.

But every once in a while, I sneak back anyway and try a new tack—if only because waterfront wharves, boats and gear are ubiquitous around here and seem so detail-y and intriguing to me that I’m just sure they’d make naturally good, potentially ever-fresh fodder for photos.

(I’m also impressed by people like Josef Sudek, who spent his entire career shooting scenes in Prague, many of them of the tiny walled garden outside his window. Think of the vitality of a mind like his, keeping such an apparently small repertoire of possibilities fresh!)

The photo you see here shows the stern of a working boat, so closely framed that it looks like an abstract composition—without being, in the end, entirely inscrutable after all.

Is this repetition? Maybe so. I’ve certainly taken lots of abstracts along the Maine waterfront.

John Szarkowski, in a famous catalog essay introducing William Eggleston’s photos at a MOMA exhibition in 1976, warned tartly against images such as “prows of sailboats reflected in rippled water” that can be “recognized by their resemblance to…Abstract Expressionist paintings” and whose “unhappy fate [it is] to remind us of something similar but better.” Wow.

I love John, and I love reading so many intelligent, incisive words on photography strung together in one place. I reread his essay regularly.

But somehow at the end of the day, I disagree with him on this point, at least in part (especially when I recall he was talking about photos that are distinctly not good)—and adhere with upthrust chin to the belief that my photo isn’t one of these.

I think the underlying reason people enjoy and “get” abstract paintings is that the world we live in has presented us—quietly and spontaneously since time immemorial—with a rich tapestry of visual experiences that can be perceived as abstractions. We see this way all the time, between moments of more conventional perception, even if we don’t often stop to think about it consciously.

I’m looking across my office right now, for example, at a cluster of colored-glass vases and houseplants in the front parlor, shimmering in a breeze and back-lit by a golden autumn sundown. No doubt you can see this scene in your mind’s eye both in the conceptual way I just described it—i.e., as being made of conventionally real objects delimited by names—and as a wordless composition of beautifully arrayed abstract shapes, colors, energies and movements.

To me, this reflects the fact that our native visual experience of the world (i.e., things the camera sees, too) came first. Abstract Expressionist painters did not discover something new that they were uniquely qualified to portray better than anyone else. And the camera was not a johnny-come-lately. On the contrary, as many observers have noted, the arrival on the scene of photography in the mid-19th century ushered in new ways of seeing that profoundly influenced painting.

And so forth.

Whether my particular photo is any good, chin upthrust or otherwise, is an open question. Place your bets. But as for me, I’m going back to the waterfront at first light.

[Above: Working boat (detail) along the wharves at Portland, Maine.]

“The secret of beginning a life of deep awareness and sensitivity lies in our willingness to pay attention.

“Our growth as conscious, awake human beings is marked not so much by grand gestures and visible renunciations as by extending loving attention to the minutest particulars of our lives. Every relationship, every thought, every gesture is blessed with meaning through the wholehearted attention we bring to it.

“In the complexities of our minds and lives we easily forget the power of attention, yet without attention we live only on the surface of existence. It is just simple attention that allows us truly to listen to the song of a bird, to see deeply the glory of an autumn leaf, to touch the heart of another and be touched. We need to be fully present in order to love a single thing wholeheartedly. We need to be fully awake in this moment if we are to receive and respond to the learning inherent in it.”

—Christina Feldman and Jack Kornfield
Stories of the Spirit, Stories of the Heart from Everyday Mind

[Above: A dumpster (detail) I photographed in Boston along the waterfront—like abstract paintings, like raku ware, like my face as I get older.]

Sometimes a photo shows something that has the effect of being contemplative even when the person who snapped it probably had no notion of being a contemplative photographer.

I found the photo you see here online; it shows Newfoundland in winter. (Hello! Guess I won’t be going to Newfoundland in winter anytime soon.)

But I noticed that it “stopped my mind”—meaning I was so struck by what I saw that my internal self-talk simply stopped for a moment. Silence. Wow! The Victorians called this “aesthetic arrest” and recognized, however obscurely, that it was A Good Thing. In modern parlance, drawing on the insights of the wisdom traditions, we’d say that the stoppage disrupts our habitual self-absorbed mode of experiencing the world and admits a sunbeam of fresher, less mediated perception.

One way of thinking about contemplative photography, then—and the contemplative arts in general (Asian brush painting, flower arranging, etc.)—is to say that they aim for this very disruption: They are, in other words, a kind of teaching more than a kind of art—at least among practitioners who know what they’re up to—because they create and draw our attention to an aware state of mind that contrasts with our usual foggy state.

(Me, I have no idea what I’m up to and I’m no teacher, even though I call myself a contemplative photographer. And maybe that’s A Good Thing, too. I just take pictures and keep the ones that seem to point in the right direction. At best, maybe I’m teaching myself.)

But the point I’d wanted to make was that there’s nothing special about the contemplative arts in “bringing us to our senses” (apart from the fact that they do it on purpose). Other good artwork can do it, too. Ordinary life experiences can do it—seeing a baby go by in a stroller—as long as we keep our eyes open and notice when our mind.

Stops.

[Above: Sorry, I can't recall where I found the photo above and can't seem to find it again now. My apologies to the photographer. But I did come across a series of remarkable tattoos created by, I guess, a very busy parlor in St. John's as well as a series of "Newfoundland bathing suits" modeled by sturdy lasses without the slightest trace of a tan.]

I had a true shock—really like seeing a ghost—at Starbuck’s the other day.

While the clerk was getting my coffee, I noticed there was a wheat penny in the tips jar. Wheat pennies are U.S. Lincoln-head cents minted from 1909 to 1958; they have the usual image of Abraham Lincoln’s head on the obverse (front) side and a now increasingly unfamiliar pair of wheat stalks on the reverse. The wheat stalks were replaced in 1959 with an image of the Lincoln Memorial that has remained on our pennies ever since.

With the clerk’s permission, I pocketed the wheat penny, a sentimental favorite from my boyhood days of coin collecting, and replaced it with another, ordinary penny.

“We get lots of those,” the clerk said, handing me my coffee.

“What?” I asked, uncomprehending. I’ve checked tips jars and cash-register change for decades wherever I go and feel lucky to find three or four wheat pennies a year.

“Sure,” he said, riffling through the jar. “Here’s another one. And another. And another!” We stepped out of the line of customers and went through the jar together, my jaw dropping ever farther as we gathered a good 20 pennies, some dating to 1911. I haven’t seen so many of them together in one place in 40 years.

The clerk explained that the rolls of pennies the shop receives from the bank are packed automatically by coin-counting machines and sometimes include caches of old currency, long in storage, that people decide to clear out.

“I associate it with bad times,” the clerk concluded. “People need the cash, and they dig into the back of their cupboards. It’s kind of sad, really.”

I gave the jar a three-dollar tip in gratitude, and the clerk my new gold-colored $1 coin, which he’d said his nephew would be interested in.

Good coffee, too.

Mary and I went to New Bedford, Mass., not long ago to visit her sister, brother-in-law and niece and to participate in the city’s “open studios” weekend holiday art sale.

The trip eventuated in an excursion to a nearby liquor store, as such trips can, to disburse our profits and learn a thing or two about the latest local microbrews. The manager showed me all the usual suspects, and I said, “No, no, no. I’ve been coming here for years, and I know all these brands. What’s new in the area?”

He then led me down the aisle to an astonishing sight, a stack of 12-packs of Narragansett, a prehistoric beer of southeastern New England that I’d believed had long since gone the way of the trilobite, Whip & Chill, and Sea Hunt.

The manager explained that a fellow formerly of Providence, Rhode Island, had remembered the brand fondly, decided there was room in the market for a nostalgic resurrection, bought the rights to the name, started brewing it again (with the help of an extant Narragansett brewmaster), and aimed to relocate the brewery back to Rhode Island from Rochester, New York, shortly.

Ah, well.

So we bought a 12-pack, naturally (for a mere $7.99, compared to the usual $1.25 or more a bottle for microbrews), stole off to Maine, and have been enjoying it in a mild way ever since.

Narragansett beer, let it be said, is no great shakes. It’s crisp, at best, with possibly a hint of spiciness. And it seems to have a lot of water in it. When I was a kid in Connecticut in the 1950s and ’60s, it had no virtue whatsoever that I’m aware of other than being the chief regional beer of New England (in addition to being, as they say, “well spoken of in the advertisements”). But you’ll recall that in those days, America as a whole was in the middle of a 75-year beer slump, like a Little Ice Age, brewing and drinking weightless, stone-cold weaselwater that was the laughingstock of the planet’s beer drinkers. This makes it difficult to render sensible views on what Narragansett was, is, or should be.

Meanwhile, according to the liquor-store manager, young people in Europe have started drinking old-time American beers like Narragansett—specifically Budweiser—because they’re “light.” Oh, merde! By that reasoning, we should be eating turkey baloney instead of foie gras.

Another brother-in-law, who lives in Appleton, Maine, listened to my tales of Narragansett on the phone this morning and informed me enthusiastically that when he was in college, in the late 1950s, he and a pal used to go skiing by tucking a couple of Narragansett GIQs (behemoth “Great Imperial Quart” bottles) into a snow bank, smuggling one of them onto an old-time enclosed ski lift, drinking it on the way up, skiing down the mountainside, and then starting all over again.

I went to college in New Haven, Connecticut, in the early 1970s, where we enjoyed—or, mostly, laughed at—a local New Haven beer called Hulls. “How is drinking Hulls like making love in a canoe?” the riddle went. Answer: “They’re both fuckin’ close to water.”

As (I am told) the implausibly starchy old mum of an acquaintance of mine used to say, 60 years ago, “My, aren’t we gay….”

By the way, the Narragansett people, bless their hearts, have an amusing little website you might enjoy.

[Above: The Narragansett Brewery in Rochester, New York. Well, no. Actually, it's a paper mill I photographed with my pal Davey when he and I were wandering around Westbrook, Maine, last month, trying to find something interesting to shoot. But I wouldn't be a bit surprised if the mill resembled a beer brewery.]

When I was a little boy, I lived behind the building you see here, just off Main Street in the seacoast town of Branford, Connecticut.

It wasn’t called “Panache” in those days, needless to say. It was a branch office of the Connecticut Light & Power Company. Note the Art Deco facade, with its bas-relief light bulbs and commercial smattering of William-Powell-Myrna-Loy style. I’ve been interested in Art Deco ever since, although it’s slightly jumbled in my mind with black-and-white movies, which I disliked because they were pervasive on TV and dull when I was a kid.

I enjoyed my childhood, I think. But my parents were having difficulties in their lives—and I sometimes suspect it’s meaningful that I don’t remember much from before 1960.

Our house was “landlocked” (i.e., no street frontage), a big, brown-shingled three-story apartment building with yellow trim reached via a driveway along the ugly backside of a two-story commercial building and a greasy spoon’s belching incinerators. Our front yard was mostly CL&P’s fenced parking lot, we had neighbors on both sides, and our backyard was a fenced lumber yard. I’ve been interested in landlocked buildings, too, ever since.

It makes me sad to realize how my parents, well-intentioned, educated people from good families, must have suffered here. My mom’s father was a prominent WWII general. Her grandfather was a prosperous Edwardian eye doctor. My dad used to be an elite economist for the U.S. government in Germany after the war. His father was an editor of the old New York Sun. But here they were, through no fault of their own, living in near-poverty—in a near-tenement, now that I think about it clearly—while my father’s health drained away and the U.S. postwar economy boomed around them.

Me, I was having a ball, sort of. My brother and sister and I jumped as high and far as we dared from the swing set; flung ourselves from bicycles onto the lawn, pretending to be stunt men getting shot; ran a lemonade stand on the sidewalk out front; built snow forts in CL&P’s plowed parking lot complete with tunnels and underground snowball caches; dug a splendid hole in our sandpile aiming to reach China; climbed the roof of the lumber yard’s warehouse to survey the realm; ate stolen concord grapes from a neighbor’s wild vines; secretly explored the other neighbor’s abandoned barn; raced around in a wagon with one kid facing forward, steering, and the other facing backward, feet astern for propulsion; camped in a tent made from old sheets draped over a sumac branch; and built a wildly ramshackle two-story tree house in the farthest, darkest back corner of the yard. Whew.

I have tender memories of planting marigolds in half eggshells as a second-grader and watching them grow, day by day, in a ragged, mud-spattered flowerbed all summer long.

Damaged goods? Maybe so. The old house is damaged, too—gone entirely, in fact, demolished about 20 years ago to expand the lumber yard. But unlike the house, I’m still here. Still finding my way. And not landlocked.

Round and round she goes.

When I was a little boy, I went to Tony’s Barber Shop in Branford, Connecticut, and sat on a wooden board across the barber’s chair so I’d be tall enough for Tony to do the job. This was pretty much my introduction to American male culture (and its mysterious smells), plus a dab of Norman Rockwell.

Later, starting in college in 1971, I cut my own hair with a pair of barber shears for a long time. Then I got tired of this, in about 1982, and went back to a real barber shop in an Art Deco arcade under Grand Central Station. The three silent, craggy old signori who ran it shared their space reluctantly with a delightful, modern Puerto Rican woman whom they hid in a back corner. I liked her best and sought her out, much to their annoyance.

In Freeport, Maine, starting around 1991, I began using a barber called George. George had a freestanding one-room shop on a back street and was the only person I ever met who actually put up a sign that said “Gone Fishin’.” George moved as slow as a sloth and was a second nephew or something of my longtime acquaintance Eddie. When I made the mistake of extolling Eddie’s virtues one day, the air thickened and darkened like a summer thunderstorm, and I learned that Eddie had once embroiled himself, despite his considerable age, with a woman who was not exactly his wife and that he was still, apparently, drawing the family’s aggregated ire in relation to this matter. Yes. Well, sorry about that.

Anyway, after about 1995, I began patronizing a genuine hairdressers’ salon in downtown Brunswick, Maine, with the result that I had to spend and talk about three times as much for a haircut. One of my hairdressers was intensely beautiful but had a voice like a sheep, and the other was the other way around.

In about 2000, I began cutting my hair myself once more (or rather having Mary cut it) into a brisk military crew cut, using electric hair trimmers. This was fun, but the trimmers gave out pretty quick and I ran through three sets of them before deciding, earlier this week, to give a barber shop I’d spotted in Bath, Maine, a try.

Junior, the barber on duty that day, looks like Bert Lahr in a white coat and has been cutting hair in the same shop, unchanged—smells and all—for 50 years. I’d been growing my hair preparatory to the visit, to give him something to do. But he clearly had no idea what I meant when I said I didn’t want “smooth” hair but a rough, modern, informal cut. He nodded pleasantly and seemed to continue making the same automatic trimming-combing-and-conversation motions he’s been making since before the introduction of the Edsel, then tippy-tapped around my head with a comb, in a puzzled and birdlike way, when it came out smooth.

Still, Mary absolutely adored my new haircut, saying it was traditional yet fresh and not a spiky cliché. I told her I keep it rough and beautiful with “Moetry in Potion,” a new hair sauce I invented (which isn’t true, of course, but I enjoyed saying it). We agreed that, if only we were the kind of people to pull it off, creating a snazzy new line of pomades called “Hair Sauces” for forward-thinking barbers—like the ever-multiplying hot sauces in Mexican restaurants—could be a great new business idea. (Not that forward-thinkingness or new smells are the real draw of barber shops.)

But anyway: Thanks, Junior. And I’ve still got my latest trimmers, quite new, at home should it ever come to that. Again.

[Above: A picture of a haircut from the blog of an amusing Swedish photo-hobbyist named Rasmus, who seems to have borrowed it in the first place from a print ad for the Montreal hair salon Orbite. The ad was created by Bleublancrouge, an advertising agency, also in Montreal. O Canada.)

One of my fabulous nieces got married in a double ceremony last July—a Christian (I guess, sort of) ceremony in Chicago and, two weeks later, a decidedly Hindu ceremony in New Jersey.

Just so we’re clear: She married the same groom each time, my excellent literary-minded new nephew-in-law or whatever he is, a young professor at Depaul.

Both weddings were grand, and Mary and I had a ball because, after all, our presence was irrelevant and all we had to do was slounge around enjoying ourselves. Everyone else was, no doubt, a wreck.

The Hindu wedding had spectacular Indian food—the best we’ve ever eaten (with the possible exception of a ludicrously expensive skyscraper-joint in Manhattan)—and bhangra dance music that blew the roof off the hotel. The dancing was so much fun that when we got home to Maine I went online to try to find a local bhangra dance center or group for us to join—and, to my surprise, came up empty-handed.

When I asked about this at our favorite Indian restaurant, the owner, who has always been inordinately kind to us (sending out free jilabi for dessert, for example), answered me in an enthusiastic yet puzzling manner about how much “we like bhangra dancing at weddings.”

Mary, later, wisely interpreted this to mean that, for him at least, bhangra is part of Indian private life, or community life, not something like square dancing that you stage for a ticket-buying maelstrom of strangers.

Maybe so. But I persist in the view that if I bhangra-danced three times a week, I’d be svelte and gleeful into my eighties.

[Above: My niece's henna'ed hand. She wore a hallucinogenically beautiful traditional-style spangle-covered red Indian wedding dress that looked like it weighed—and did in fact weigh—30 pounds.]

The brilliant beach you see here is in the sizzling tropical splendor of—well—Chicago.

It’s true. I was there last July with Mary for a niece’s wedding, and it was ding-dong hot. Two weeks later, the groom’s Indian parents hosted a repeat wedding for the couple, a traditional Hindu ceremony in Piscataway, New Jersey, where Mary and I were asked to stand in for our niece’s parents when her real parents didn’t show up because one of them was deathly ill—but got a lot better the following week. (I foresee years of therapy on that.)

Anyway, that’s Chicago. Twelve years ago, I talked my mother- and father-in-law into moving from a lonely retirement in the pathological heat of Houston, Texas, to join us in Maine—over protests of “Oh, it’s too cold!”—by cracking the library’s NOAA reference books and demonstrating that coastal Maine is substantially warmer in winter (and cooler in summer) than Chicago, a perfectly popular American city full of our relations, none of whom says, “Oh, it’s too cold. And too hot.” Even though they probably should.

Still, after many happy, comfortable years in Maine, my father-in-law died in December 2004 and was buried at a veterans’ cemetery near the state capital of Augusta. And in a few more years, one supposes, his wife will join him there. Which means that, being 40 miles inland and given global warming, the site’ll probably be both colder and hotter than Chicago after all.

Ah, factoids.