The Mind's Eye
I’m currently enrolled in a 10-week photography class entitled “The Mind’s Eye”. It is being taught by David Ulrich, a photographer and teacher based in Hawaii. His latest book is called “The Mindful Photographer: Awake in the World with a Camera”, and the class is based in part on some of the examples of mindful photography that Ulrich provides in the book. We are currently in week 6, and I have to say that this has been a very challenging course!
For much of my time as a photographer, I have been most interested in landscapes and more recently, the plentiful birds in our lovely area on the coast. This class has required me to get out of my comfort zone and explore new concepts and themes in photography and be much more thoughtful and intentional when I go out with my cameras.
While I have never formally studied art theory or photography -I’m mostly self-taught-I will modestly say that I’m an accomplished photographer technically. What I mean is that I know how to use my cameras and all of their functions, and I can generally make a photograph that is technically clear, focused, and properly exposed, with good color and contrast. All well and good…and yet…
I have always known that there is much more to being a photographer than technical skills, and that is why I’m in this class-to allow myself to be challenged and pushed to go beyond mere technique and strive for photographs with deeper meaning, and that communicate emotion and use visual metaphors, and in some way connect with the viewer to possibly deeper truths. I don’t want to get too pretentious about this-I still love photographing nature and birds, and not every photograph has to carry some deeper meaning- as a phrase wrongly attributed to Freud says, “Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar…”
The above photograph is of a tiny section of the stunning and enigmatic Memorial to the Murdered Jew of Europe in Berlin. I made the photograph in 2016, and I find it quite disturbing-but not nearly as disturbing as the experience of walking through the memorial. I believe the photograph is of “something more” than merely an image of an assemblage of concrete blocks. It is up to the viewer to decide what that something might be.