Zen and the Magic of Photography by Wayne Rowe

Author:Wayne Rowe
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
Publisher: Rocky Nook
Published: 2010-04-15T16:00:00+00:00

Conclusion

In closing, let me summarize the interactive and interconnected parts of the process described in Part I: the experiencing of Zen through photography and photography through Zen.

1. Open yourself to the light, images, and reality around you. At first you need to consciously create a heightened state of awareness where the mind is open, receptive, and actively looking for images. The more you actively look, the more the action will become intuitive and natural, subconscious and effortless. With practice, your eye will be intuitively and subconsciously drawn to the light, and the light will be drawn to your eye. You will react to the light. You will feel the light. You will concentrate your focus on the light. And, you will find that your normal, everyday state of mind has become an open, aware, and receptive state.

2. Open yourself to feel—look with your capacity to feel—and you will experience and become part of the Now, Reality, Being; the isness of the moment. Always follow your feelings, whether you are capturing one image per hour or seven images per second.

3. Experiencing real moments will lead you to a culminating moment of satori—a moment when you hear the light; the image sings; and form, content, and feeling are one. Joel Meyerowitz expressed it this way: “You should be totally enraptured... by the experience itself...It’s about passage of the experience itself, in its wholeness, through you, back into the world, selected out by your native instincts”. Manuel Alvarez Bravo summarized the experience of capturing real moments even more succinctly: “It goes in through my eye, and out through my camera”.

4. Lastly, no matter which medium you choose—still photography, videography, cinematography, haiku, calligraphy, acting, singing, dance, music, painting, surfing, archery, or tennis—you will, by virtue of being in the moment, improve the quality of your art. I have found that if I open myself to the light and images around me; if I look with my capacity to feel; if I approach both the animate and the inanimate worlds with the I-Thou attitude; if I maintain a blank, empty, but sensitized mind (the “mind of no-mind”, placed nowhere but everywhere, like the moon in water); then I am able to see more, to feel more, and to be more. As a photographer, I can capture more of the invisible images around me. By being in the moment I can experience photography through Zen, and conversely, Zen through photography. It makes me a better photographer, opens me to real moments, and eliminates artificial distinctions between seeing, being, and photography. They become one and the same thing.

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