Koan - Two Farmers

Two farmers tried for years to harvest a barren plot.  Finally, one said to the other, “I’m filthy, my body is all I own, and my imagination is nearly exhausted. I thought you said this was a fertile space?”  The other replied, “It’s not?”

The reflex image...

In reflex photography, the shutter-mirror reflects the light from outside, from “other,” onto and into the eye, causing the faintest glimmer of its image to reflect back onto the shutter-mirror and out again.  Thus, the light-image from outside creates the light-image from inside.  Outside becomes inside.  No separation.

And in the instant of opening the shutter to register the image, pure blindness; utter darkness; ankoku.  The very image in time and space with which one chooses to fulfill their desire is inherently denied by the very technology that seemingly produces the out-of-time manifestation of such desire. 

On the surface, desire and acceptance may seem antithetical.  And since desire motivates action while acceptance instigates transformation, this may create a fundamental paradox within the movement of life itself.

Photo: Michael Sakamoto, spirit medium at faun pii (spirit dance) ceremony, Lampang, Thailand, Dec 2010

The effect of intent (after Zeami)

 

Cyclo driver, Saigon, 2005.

How does a photographer’s intent manifest in a photo? 

If there is intention, there must also be meaning in the photographer’s mind.  “I intend to capture the photo that I am about to take in the next moment because there is something significant in my mind about that incipient future moment.”  It’s like when you’re driving on the open road and see something in the distance that catches your eye.  As you drive closer, it also seems to be approaching you, growing in visibility, context, and, inevitably, meaning.  The latter is largely a function of our second nature tendency to interpret and assign a place in our cosmology to everything we see.  John Berger states:

“Certainty may be instantaneous; doubt requires duration; meaning is born of the two. An instant photographed can only acquire meaning insofar as the viewer can read into it a duration extending beyond itself. When we find a photograph meaningful, we are lending it a past and a future.”

            So what did I intend by taking this photo of my cyclo driver in Saigon?  Even more, what did I mean by it? 

            I look at this photo now and am struck by how many of my current philosophical concerns are visible within it.  The group of cyclos we are traveling in is in the middle of a roundabout on the grand boulevard of the city during a torrential rain, lending a sense of infinite circularity to its arduous and melancholy tone.  A certain layered duality of the gaze can be sensed in the fact that the driver may or may not have his eyes open while he may or may not be glancing back at me, who he knows is taking photos.  Neither of us knows what the other knows about the other, placing us in both identical and separate mental spaces at the same time.

            To get back to my question, absolutely none of this was apparent to me when I took the photo.  To be honest, I merely noticed that the hood of the cyclo created an interesting visual frame that echoed the wide rectangle of my shutter as well as a cinema frame.  Thus, I simply hoped to capture a “cinematic” moment, whatever that meant.  I wasn’t concerned with any of the issues that the image engenders within me now, and I unfortunately wasn’t thinking about what the photo might mean to the driver himself.  (As much as I hate to admit it, Sontag was right that photographers tend to be not only voyeurs but, just as often, voleurs as well.)

Araki Nobuyoshi depicts a struggle against the absolute reality of a photo-subject that one knows one cannot fundamentally alter (in his case, “woman”), causing one to see oneself more clearly, warts and all.  It is the impossible subject as mirror.  In an essay from 1976, he states just as much:

In photographing a woman’s genitals laid bare, you must make the stripper and the audience know when the shutter is released. Likewise, the strobe flashes in time with the shutter’s sound. With that, the stripper’s embarrassment and one’s own embarrassment can be bared clearly, to the stripper and the audience alike, and the person who releases the shutter himself is likewise exposed.

Ultimately, Araki represents the art of photographing as, not merely self-declaration or expression, but self-actualization and existence; a visualized and imagined performance of self in the “looking-glass” of the camera lens.  We might say therefore that in photography the manifestation of intent and excitement is an act of self-actualization. 

In the seconds before opening my shutter, was there something generated within me that reflected the potential for excitement that the resulting image might cause?  Perhaps I merely knew something was there that would excite me.  The fact that the driver is not looking at me while needing to look at everything else around us on a very busy road was what inspired me to “create” this moment, as it were.  In other words, the driver’s intention to maintain his attention away from me, despite being aware of my camera, made manifest an excitement within me, allowing me to experience the flower of interest within my perception of his state of being.  This then led directly to the seed of my intent to take the photo and likewise produce a further layer of excitement and wonder within me.

Thus, photography can be a way of realizing the interior vision, voice, and intent of the photographer that results in an expression that both fully reveals their presence and does not do so at all. 

All this because it was raining that day.

(Thanks to Peter Sellars)

Kamaitachi elegy for Japan - March 2011

With what lens, what eyes, may we view our own chaos?  There’s a trickster in each of us, with the power to instigate change.  

His generative nature laying fertile beneath the surface, beyond age, gender, and experience.

Much of the time hidden in the shadows of the mind.

Sometimes hiding in plain sight between heaven and earth.

And sometimes appearing to us when we least expect it, subtly altering our perceptions.

He knows change is inevitable, and his every action begs the question, What will grant you the power to adapt?

Even in the gloaming, after much is said and done, the creature lurks, ever present.

Even in places and feelings we’ve abandoned to the past.

Even then, pattering along, does he search for victims or guard the community’s source of sustenance?

Abducting the fruits of the community’s labor for his own purposes, or preserving its legacy’s potential?

In a gathering storm, he is at home where the past is washed away and destroyed and where the future is born.

A glimpse at his passing, dashing uncontrollably across the landscape, transforming from one form to another in every second. The oval of light shaped by the moment of the eyelid raising, making the surrounding darkness a reflection of the viewer’s interior. Or is it a mushroom cloud, with the flash of 10,000 suns, tearing the air asunder, the only thing that makes him visible; the moment of ultimate disaster and chaos the only instant we see his, or our, true nature?

Dancing, leaping in place, his head and face up against the edge, the border between light and darkness. A dance of death? Reaching for the stars? Or simply feeling at home in an instant of pure liminality, when matter and antimatter exist in both opposition and balance?

We may be anxious about what he has wrought. Is it dusk or dawn? Is this his, or our, last dance, first steps, or both?

After the waters have receded, a harvest of pain, but without guilt or shame.

The light of the sun reflected by the full moon, which his body reflects upon the dry, sallow land, regenerating its fertility for an even greater future harvest.

Even shorn of traditional implements, memory is yet held and translated. Mourning the dead or revivification?

Hibernating, communing with, and rejuvenating humanity’s fertile potential.

Back in his lair, the shadow of the mind, floating, waiting, transcendent...

(Photos by Hosoe Eikoh; featuring Hijikata Tatsumi; from the series, "Kamaitachi")

True love is...

...letting someone make their own mistakes.

Don't quote me on that.

“Don’t quote me on that.” How many times have we heard this statement or perhaps said it ourselves? Yet still it happens, all day, everyday, with every one of us. How many times do we say in conversation, “But he/she said…” or “It’s true. I read it.”

Yes, the person did say that. But so what? In that moment, place, mood, frame of mind, belief and value structure, and so on, it happened. That’s all. There’s really nothing more you can say about it.

What you do with that information, of course, is a whole other matter. In the 1960s, some students of Suzuki Roshi of San Francisco Zen Center loosely transcribed a number of his talks, many from notes or just plain memory, and collected them into what quickly became and still is the best-selling book ever in the West on Zen Buddhist practice, “Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind.” Is it good information? Yes. Did Suzuki approve of the book? Yes. Did he say those words? Most of them, in some form or another. Are these exact words his exact thoughts? Kinda sorta for the most part kinda. Do the vast majority of the millions who have read the book take it as the actual, firm essence of Suzuki’s philosophy and life’s work as well as an essential representation of Zen Buddhism? Yes.

Once you sign your name, people think they know who you are. People are going to make of things whatever they want to, and you have no control over it. Once you say something, it not only becomes the past and history but also fodder for the myths and imaginaries that individually and collectively accrete over time as a natural, ineluctable process.

But don’t quote me on that.

Sometimes it just happens.

Sometimes it just happens.

I take a lot of photos. Too many, in fact. There are probably only about four or five that I’m genuinely proud of. Or maybe pride is the wrong way to think about it. That would mean I’m in control. If I feel this, it’s just a feeling, and that’s all.

Am I with the image, the moment? Is that what’s happening? Am I merely there to witness its existence, passing in an instant?

Or is it something that’s between the too-active of the former and too-passive of the latter? Do I allow myself to notice certain things, to position myself in a certain relation to the world that I’m not actually separate from, no matter how clear the division is in my head?

I look. I notice. I feel for how open I want to be in this relationship (aperture and shutter speed).

I frame. I open the shutter. And something clicks…