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!]