Chris Orwig in his wonder-full photography book
Visual Poetry says’
If there is one lesson that photography’s taught me – life is short. I use my camera in order to extend and slow life’s time frame. Sometimes it works and other times it gets in the way. Either way, whatever gear you have, whatever light is available….it is good enough. Don’t let another day pass.
Orwig makes the above statement having told the story of a student who travelled home to take photograph’s of his father. He didn’t because he didn’t think the light was very good – and shortly after returning heard that his father had passed away.
Extending or slowing down the time frame is an example of a more general truth about new media and the digital age. The Mp3 player, the Sky+ box, podcasting, DVDs are all about control of time-arranging time, allowing us experiences that are outside of the normal time-frame.
This ‘Eternal Moments‘ blog is my journal exploring the spirit of photography, including the idea that photography like cinema bears close similarity to what’s called the mystical experience which in shorthand might be said to be a three stage experience – 1. me and object – 2. object - 3. object and me. This experience was caught a long time ago (8th Century) by the Chinese poet Li Po;
“The birds have vanished from the sky,
and now the last clouds slip away.
We sit alone, the mountain and I,
until only the mountain remains.”
I’ve suggested that perhaps there is no such thing as the spirit of photography – HERE Perhaps the camera is no more, and no less, than the calligrapher’s brush, or the dancer’s body in space.
Chris says; ‘ I use my camera in order to extend and slow life’s time frame.’
The moment ‘captured’ in the photographic image reminds us of the eternal now. Whether we wallow in regret and a longing for what cannot be re-created or whether the moment simply reminds us to come back to the now, and to there rest content, depends on how egoic we are being at that time! Tolle is a contemporary master teacher who is completely relevant to the idea of exploring how and in what ways photographic experience (photographer and viewer) is like spiritual experience – some of my favourite Tolle-isms are HERE.
Chris says, ‘….Sometimes it works and other times it gets in the way…’
What does it get in the way of – when it doesn’t work? My answer is it gets in the way of the flow of spirit, life-force, xin in Chinese. This includes flow in the traditional Chinese sense of chi, the interruption of which, or the diminution of which, is re-balanced via such arts as acupuncture. It is also flow in the sense of by Mihály Csíkszentmihályi, the positive psychology concept who gave us the notion that flow is the mental state of operation in which the person is fully immersed in what he or she is doing by a feeling of energized focus, full involvement, and success in the process of the activity. See – HERE
The timelessness of the contemplative experience has a co-equivalent in photography. For the photographer it is the flow experience that culminates in a perfect, or sufficiently perfect, photograph. For the viewer it is the experience of a photograph, or set of photographs, that provide the kind of experience that Li Po describes in his poem. We then have what I am sure is a highly unfashionable aesthetic theory – namely that the art experience is the mystical experience.
The spirit of photography perhaps is the spirit of being human – experienced via the photographic medium.
Is there such a thing as the spirit of photography? Perhaps there is a spirit in the sense that the medium has a number of distinguishing and defining characteristics – some shared with painting, dance, music et – some not.
If the spirit of photography relates to the characteristics of the medium does Barthes in Camera Lucida conflate two subjects best kept apart; the workings of the human spirit and the distinguishing features of the photographic medium?
I am so glad Chris Orwig has published his wonder-full book. I say this as has someone who has loved poetry, and the teaching of poetry, for a very long time – and as someone who has loved photography for a long time. But I never put the two together. It is possible that Orwig’s main contribution might well turn out to be his extending of the language of photography, and thereby extending the language of the human spirit.
I’m off to do Assignment 1!
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The Visual Poetry site is HERE
The Visual Poetry FLICKr site is HERE – send in your Visual Poetry assignment photographs!
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