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.]