An idea came to me while sitting in morning meditation, an idea I couldn't let go of, and I followed it.  I was caught between the need to create as an artist, and the aspiration to be content with what life presents, to leave well enough alone.  I took on the project as a "choice duty".

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Field photography is close to the opposite of scientific method.  Instead of starting with a hypothesis from which certain conclusions are drawn, one simply explores to learn partial truths.  To the extent that one can do this without an agenda, more sincere results are apt to occur.  Any hypothesis inevitably conditions what will be looked for, and what will consequently be seen or not seen.

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For a long time I’ve been taking it for granted that inviting chance and working with it as an aspect of my artwork was good.  Now I’m ready to reconsider the balance between order and chance, and the philosophical implications.  Is chance the opposite of order or an aspect of it?  The law of karma says, in effect, “what goes around comes around,” which is another way of saying there is an unfathomable order.  Visible patterns can be profoundly meaningful.  However, many patterns are invisible.  Is chance a stealth pattern, or the machinations of fatalism?  I’ve been interested in how various artists in many disciplines use indeterminacy and systems to short-circuit ego.  Generating images in this way is most interesting when the system is undetectable and the results speak to the heart like a good song. However, like many, I have been unable to accept all of chance’s gifts.  Making art is a lot like parenting insofar as it involves negotiating chaos.

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The art of photography, like love or meditation, is a challenge for a seasoned practitioner to keep fresh.  I guess it’s like an old friendship that ripens over years.  Sometimes we fall out of touch, but always reconnect when the bond is genuine.  Keeping things fresh and alive is always a kind of returning to basics.

Like a cup of tea, the time taken, all the world’s infinite cares abandoned till the cup empties.  We return to the fray, refreshed and awake.  Art should be like that, even if it only holds someone for three seconds.

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Precious gems can be likened to photographs in that both are born of hardened light.  Perhaps all good art and poetry is that. (After reading Stones of the Sky by Pablo Neruda.)

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Last night, actually early this morning, I dreamt half-asleep, half-awake of how we know the meaning of a mark in a photograph.  The photographic signifier can be intentional, accidental, or incidental.  It can be a signal for information, reverie, desire, or altruism.  How do we know a mark; and to what extent does it matter that the mark be made with light directly striking sensitized silver, or that it encodes light through a complex digital process?  All these questions and thoughts seemed to be so important in my dream.  I see now that the Dalai Lama book I’ve been reading about science corresponds pretty accurately with the way I’ve been thinking about photographs.  Meaning emerges out of the interdependence of the image, the observer, and the cultural context.  We cannot objectively know a mark, but we can infer a fairly accurate reading through repeated empirical third person investigation.  However, I feel and understand a photograph from a first person encounter within the changing moment.  To the extent we see the photograph as an image, we tend to see it less as a document, and vice-versa.  Another rediscovery, another dream to share.

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My generation was condemned to suffer through the virtues of ugliness.

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Classical shakuhachi (Japanese bamboo flute) music can be likened to a photograph with no center of interest, yet with something curious to find in any area within the frame.  Honkyoku unfolds in time through jagged and contrasty, subtle lines of tone.  Shakuhachi, like ambient music, allows the listener to place one’s attention without compulsion, each note and phrase rising and falling with the breath of life.

Photographs compress time within confined space.  Photographs can call the imagination to remember - and the flow of time collapses, again in the moment.  Many if not most photographs seek to catch the eye of the viewer, usually with dazzling colors and angles, and potent or loaded subject matter.  Ambient photography seeks merely to generate an atmosphere with subtle color.  Often there is no center of interest at all.  It would be folly to associate ambient photography with wallpaper, for it is not merely decorative.  The best photography leaves a viewer who takes their time something subtle to take home and ponder.

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It is easy to intellectually understand the non-inherent existence of a photograph.  It is made from so many conditions.  If other choices had been made during production, the resultant image would look very different.  For something to exist inherently and permanently it would have to be beyond the limits of cause and effect. Photographs or any other phenomena are empty of inherent existence precisely because they are impermanent.  It is more difficult to understand the non-inherent existence of the subject matter depicted in photographs.  Even though there is no way to go back and find exactly the same scene in the field, we say the event occurred at a former moment in time and space.  We invert the true meaning of the image as evidence of impermanence into a reification of the substantial world in the waking state.  The wise photographer understands that a picture is not, cannot ever be completely true and documentary.  It is always a perception from a particular perspective filtered through technology and an array of decisions.  The event that was fleeting, is now gone.  Still, a beautiful nude does not fail to excite.  The subject may be long dead or past her prime in the present moment, yet the photograph traces and holds her youth and beauty in perpetuity.  It is a total illusion, yet to see that as mere silver or ink on paper without getting aroused, is like the Buddha seeing all sentient beings in the light of non-dual wisdom.

Who sees the picture?  What actually sees?  From where does the image arise, abide, and go?  It is not the eyes or the brain, but rather the mind, the uncontrived awareness that sees.  Understand this now.

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I have been thinking about my experience photographing landscapes.  On the one hand, they are not about me, yet still places I for one reason or another intensely relate to.  Within that, the act of making a landscape photograph is an attempt to honestly communicate something not only about the look of the place, but also the feeling, the history, the light and weather charged into form.  Some people consider that an impossible task.  They deride the endeavor from the onset.  When we make appearances solid through words or pictures do we damage memory?  Do we remember the experience of being at the sea, or the picture we brought home?  Consider why you make landscapes.  That is reasonable.

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Before you can read between the lines, you have to be able to park between them.

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Funny, I just realized while reading my notes earlier in this moleskin that the reason I haven’t found a way to successfully focus more on subject matter where I have a personal investment is that when I’m peacefully drinking tea I don’t want to be bothered with photography.  When I’m meditating or practicing dharma I don’t want to break that to do photography.  When I’m doing Tai Chi or blowing my flute I want to continue doing those things and not think about photography.  I’m basically not interested in documenting anything.  I’m not that kind of photographer if given the choice.  I want to make awesome pictures of I don’t know what, and celebrate the light.  Still, I am prepared to focus on whatever benefits, whether I want to or not.  It is not a problem unless I make it one.  Habit is the problem.

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 "There are poets who claim that their poems are made to show the world through the prism of language. Their project is worthy. There is also the work of seeing the world without any prism of language, and to bring that seeing into language. The latter has been the direction of most Chinese and Japanese poetry." (From Back On the Fire by Gary Snyder.

After reading this quote I wrote the following.

Do I "previsualize" a photograph? There is an instant of seeing, a moment of being in the present that gives rise to an inner voice, that says something like "perhaps this would work." Of course, any technical or compositional decision thereafter will determine what the picture looks like. Anyone who understands craft previsualizes to some extent. Even if its just a decision to hold the camera vertical or horizontal. Yet the moment of seeeing the world in its rawness, the uncooked world seen with clear awareness without the prism of pictorial conventions, without the baggage carried by language, is the true source of inspiration. To bring fresh seeing into form, as a photograph, is the challenge I hope to rise to in my work. Confidence in this possibility is where Buddhism and post-modernism part company.

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There seems to be another paradigm shift rumbling the fault lines of both photography as art and popular music.  Photography likened to poetry was very much dismissed and displaced by photography as ersatz painting some time ago.  Now, with the return of the singer-songwriter tradition, the photographer troubadours are making a comeback as well.  This type of work is often misunderstood as mere formalism.   Poetry equally weighs the sound of words with what they mean.  Similarly, formalist photography, for all its narrowness, balanced attention to form and literal content.  The anti-aesthetic movement rejected this, focusing instead on the political.  There is a fresh wind blowing, weary of both old and new school agendas.

Critics and academics are nearly always so quick to pigeonhole artists.  You have to be either this or that.  Still, stunning hybrids continue to emerge out of the circumference of culture.  A new tribe beats an old drum.  The sound echoes praises of difference; new rages against the status quo, edged with “the audacity of hope.”

However, perhaps I am wrong.  Maybe there is no paradigm shift, but better yet a healthy coexistence of parallel approaches, wherein the risk of change finds voice beside multiple traditions along the myriad roads we must all travel to keep our spirits bright.

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A very long time ago, sorting through some pictures of my girlfriend, I removed the ones where she looked lost.  Our snapshot album, the page of our time together, was a collection of happy scenes filled with what I wanted to believe was real for both of us.  And then she left me.  Now I wish I still had those sad snapshots.  They weren’t any truer than the happy ones, but together they would have preserved a more complete picture of our time together.  Life is complicated and our sufferings and struggles are a big part of it.  Many things, however, are swept under the rug into an unconscious accumulation of disappointments.  Hearing a long forgotten song ushers memories back over the threshold, just like an old faded snapshot recovered from a dusty drawer.  The keys of the piano rise and fall with the fingers that pulled a song out of space long ago, now little more than a wireless signal from computer to stereo.  Yet there was a time when albums turned, when film froze moments, still lying there on fading sheets of paper.  Nothing could be stronger evidence of impermanence than the snapshot. A few years ago the snapshot albums from my first marriage literally fell apart.  Now together with other fallen pages they inhabit an archival black box.  Like my memories, they are out of order, yet somehow inexplicably preserved.  I open that box ever so seldom, hesitant to reconnect with those scattered joys.  Someday these artifacts too shall be dispersed.

The snapshot aesthetic uses the casual style and crappy quality of the amateur to reveal hidden lives; to expose those things people aren’t supposed to talk about.  For those living on the fringes of society:  the artists, junkies, clowns, gangsters and queers, there is still a need to feel part of a community.  Even a yogi living in a cave knows that there is a sangha out there who supports the choice he has made to spend his life as a renunciate.  Only a person who has given up all attachments is free of the past and future, and can truly live within the moment.  They don’t need picture albums.  The rest of us, however, steer our reveries with endless stimuli, and nothing takes us to the root of a moment lost to the hammer of time better than a snapshot.  Through our selections of pictures we engineer memories.  The snapshot aesthetic is simply a way of working where technique is disregarded in favor of humble results that illuminate otherness and validate difference.  There are many art worlds.  The snapshot can be art if artists say so, and also because it continues a tradition of catharsis.  The snapshot aesthetic displays alternative lifestyles and exposes vulnerability on both sides of the camera.  It critiques hypocrisy and abhors prejudice, and should not be judged based on the criteria of works that seek to celebrate nature with big negatives.  Unlike the casual portrait it does not need to be considered good photography.  Perhaps because of my attachment to craft I am only just now beginning to open my heart to the poignancy of these tragic photographic diaries and personal documents.

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In addition to being a technology, a practice, and a process, photography is also an industry. The values of the photographic industry are automation, speed, and complexity. These values are seen by most as intrinsically better than manual operation, slowness, and simplicity.  Automation can indeed be helpful in a tight situation, but is that the real reason it is most often used, or is it because of a lack of knowledge to do otherwise?  Perhaps we would do better to slow down so as to better see the world more vividly, compose and expose more carefully, and appreciate the moment more fully. We live in an age when a camera can be either a timepiece or a computer with a lens on it.  The various overlapping spheres of photographic practice require different tools. If you want to become a commercial photographer you have no choice but to embrace the values of the industry.  This translates into more megapixels.  A fine art photographer is free to be simple, yet is still bound by craft.  A photo-based artist is likely to be either indifferent or hostile to the values of the industry, and to old school priorities as well.  On the sidelines, amateurs passively adapt to the latest advances in techno-ease.

I encourage you to question the values of the industry.

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Pictures can’t tell secrets, but they can show them.  The problem is, who would know?  It would take a caption or a sequence to relay the secret, which would immediately cease being a secret!  Photography does not tell - it shows.

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Over the years I have grown somewhat weary of irony in photography.  It is almost always tinged with sarcasm. Also, visual metaphor has become less and less important insofar as it invokes reverie, and even though that can be a sweet solace, it distances one from the present moment of wakefulness.  Robert Wyatt once commented that “you commit yourself to what you’re left with.” With photography, then, that would be emphasizing the fact that pictures are excellent at showing, but not always too accurate a way of telling, particularly when they are not anchored to a particular text or sequence.

I long ago asked my friend Erich to translate a text I had written into German.  When he came to the Roland Barthes quote “the referent adheres,” he really hit the wall, so to speak.  What Barthes meant was that we can never fully escape the primacy of subject matter.  This is true for even the most abstract photographic image.