The Contemplative Eye

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.]