Complete Contemplative Portfolio

I am experiencing continuing technical difficulties with creating an actual DVD, so I decided to go ahead and post my final portfolio project for Contemplative Photography on the web. (For regular visitors, the first slideshow is the same one that appeared in the previous post)

Portfolio Intro "Taking Stock":

Reflections on artistic process
In the process of putting together this portfolio, I've been thinking a lot about the connection between the process of creating photographs and the process of writing poetry. I majored in English as an undergrad, with a concentration in creative writing, and spent a lot of time reading, writing, revising and critiquing poetry. The comparisons between the two forms are obvious in some ways: both are primarily concerned with using images to communicate a message or invoke a feeling, both rely heavily on metaphor, both can be done carelessly or with great attention.

At the same time, I'm also really appreciating the the differences between the experiences of writing and photographing. Sometimes I feel photography—despite the technical and artistic challenges of creating a good photograph—is somehow easier than poetry, in the sense that it is more direct. The process of poetry is a little bit like translating a feeling into an image, then translating that image into words, which have both intellectual meaning and musical sound. Of course, not all poetry works directly with images, but anyone who has taken an introductory creative writing class knows the tyranny of the “objective correlative”: “No ideas but in things!” I'd like to think that type of academic training, which encouraged me to constantly translate between feelings, ideas, images, and words, has influenced my photography through this semester.

More generally, through actively engaging with the photographic process this semester, I've come to see in poetry and photography a shared experience of craft and composition. One of the things I had been least excited about in anticipating this class was learning digital editing. It was something I dreaded; it seemed technical and also kind of dishonest (or maybe like cheating...as in, “I wasn't good enough to get the shot right the first time, so I'll just fix it in Photoshop”). So I was shocked to discover, maybe about halfway through the semester, that I love editing photos.

What I've realized now is, while some people can and do have a utilitarian attitude toward working with photos digitally, that the editing process can also be a careful process of loving attention; more like revising a poem than erasing a mistake. Just as I come to feel closer to and more invested in my poems as I work and rework them, I started to get very “into” my photos as I edited. As I engaged in the process of giving an image my full attention, looking for the promise in it, intuitively examining it for emotional resonance, and working to bring out that resonance, I felt that process itself was literally creative—making something new from the raw material of the image.

That experience of full attention is something I found evidence of as I looked through my photographs. I like to make pictures that focus on one thing, or evoke one feeling. There were a lot of my photos that involved getting down on eye level with subjects, walking around to see them from different angles, working to engage them in the space and create a sense of intimacy in the image.

I was also surprised to find that I liked working in black and white. As a person who absolutely loves color (as you can see in a couple of the color stills, evidencing the bright orange and red walls of my house), I always tended toward color photography. And while I still enjoy photographing in color, I found as I was pulling together images for the final project that it was the black and white versions of photos that really spoke to me. The light and shadow seemed to have a power of distillation that made the images more powerful. Just like poetry is prose distilled and made more potent, it felt to me that black and white photography could sometimes distill an image—strengthening it's emotional content by changing our relationship to it. Just like poetry is the familiar medium of words, made magic and unfamiliar through economy and craft.

Approaches and Values
As I worked on the portfolio and on this reflection, I went back to reread the introduction to my poetry portfolio that I wrote in 2002. I found one line that seems to almost anticipate the photographic approach I've discovered through this course. Six years ago, I wrote: “Generally, I prefer a poem that focuses on a single idea. To use another metaphor, if one thinks of a poem as a room, I would rather the poem be a dark room with one object in the middle under a spotlight, than a well-lit room filled with beautiful things, although both types of rooms have their merits.” Looking through the images I've created over the semester, I notice that, literally, that is how I like to photograph—focusing on one thing, under a (literal or figurative) spotlight. As I write this now, I also realize it's the way I like to interact with people—having one on one conversations rather than being in a group. I might even go so far to say that it's the way I've structured my life—putting down roots in one community, instead of traveling around to lots of different places for a little while.

I'd like to think that approach to photography, and to my life, says something about my values, and that it embodies the “respect, humility and wonder” that we have been talking about through the semester. In thinking about how I practice those values, I believe I need to be careful that the desire for focus and attention doesn't turn into a desire for control. I took a big lesson from the sand dollar photos, which were some of my favorites. The assignment was to try different kinds of lighting. Not knowing very much about lighting, I spent a whole morning just placing the sand dollar in different places in my apartment and playing with camera settings, rather than attempting to get some particular “shot” that I imagined or planned. My photos were much better when I just started taking pictures, and took a lot of them, and spent a lot of time with the subject...trying different angles, just playing around. As soon as I start thinking of how I “want it to look,” instead of just being open to how it does look, my photos start to feel pretentious and contrived. I sometimes face a similar struggle with poetry. My writing suffers when I try to be too clever, or start self-censoring, instead of just letting the words come.

So here I am at the end of the semester, with a little movie of images and quotation and music that is not what I set out to do, or what I imagined I would make, but just what happened when I let myself get involved with the images. I hope that the sense of intimacy with the world, deep attention, and poignancy that I feel when I look at these pictures together as a whole comes through to the viewer.

In addition to the portfolio, I wanted to go ahead and share a slideshow of some color photos I took over the course of the semester. These are more numerous, and harder to tie together into a whole, but I suppose the overarching theme is trying to find new ways of seeing what's around me--finding and defining ourselves in relationship to the world.

Slideshow

This tiny movie has taken up several hours of my life. It is my final project in progress for a photography course I am taking this spring. The music is from "Fever Dream" by Iron and Wine, off the album Our Endless Numbered Days. The quotation from Pema Chodron is incorporated here to emphasize the sort of magic intimacy with the world that sometimes happens when you focus all of your attention on one little moment.










It seems a little sad to me, but I can't tell if that's something inherent in the photos or just the fact that I'm feeling sad today. I think I tend to experience the world as poignant most of the time. (I looked up that word to be sure I was using it right. According to a note in Mirriam Webster, "poignant implies a bittersweet response that combines pity and longing or other contradictory emotions." So, yes...that's the term I was looking for. The note, incidentally, is in the fascinating context of a discussion of the proper distinctions between describing something as "moving," "touching," "poignant," "pathetic," or "affecting." You really do learn something new every day.)

The full quotation--in case you didn't have your glasses on to read the tiny screen, and/or you care to see it punctuated properly: "Mindfulness is loving all the details of our lives, and awareness is the natural thing that happens: life begins to open up, and you realize that you're always standing at the center of the world."

A light at the end of the tunnel

Train of thought this morning:
*I am feeling very uninspired about this paper I need to write.
*Remember what your undergrad thesis adviser said: "don't get it right...just get it writ'."
*I wonder if my thesis adviser is still teaching at Pomona? (brief visit to Pomona's website)
*Wow, Pomona has a lot of new profs, and from the looks of it a pretty awesome English department right now.
*I love reading the "interests" paragraphs on English department staff bios: T.S. Eliot, Marxist and media theory, the history of vulnerability, the development of the maxim, food studies, digital culture (seriously, these all appear on the staff bios page...I can't make this stuff up).
I kind of miss studying literature.

It goes on from there, but let me pause here to briefly highlight the metaphor "train of thought." I always associated that with the idea of forward motion--progressing on a track. Not until this morning, when I was doubting whether that really accurately reflected my thought process, did the idea occur to me that a train is in essence a series of discrete but linked cars, each coupled to the next. The idea of picking up (and releasing) cars as the journey progresses...now that has some metaphorical resonance. Why had I never thought about it like that before? Is that how everyone else thinks of it?

Anyway (I'll show some limited restraint and only allude to a pun about getting "derailed"), where I've ended up is feeling a bit nostalgic for the days of novels and verse. I was complaining to Drew last night that all of my thoughts these days are very concrete. Academic musings focus on EPA regulations, governance structures, economic history, activism strategies, coal mines...and even my personal reflections are tending toward the material, with thoughts on timing transplants for the garden and materials lists for the planned renovations on the house this summer. The sort of running abstract, emotive commentary that's usually going in my head is strangely absent these days.

Drew suggested this might be a function of the fact that all of the reading I'm doing lately is academic--texts on research methods, advocacy planning handbooks, articles on the coal industry, planning guides for community development program monitoring and evaluation, and the like. It is interesting to realize that at the height (or depth?) of my previous higher education experience, I was engrossed in Henry James and contemporary poetry--equally academic but entirely different. One might expect an overall different effect on the psyche here, in a social science oriented graduate program focused on training practitioners to work in the field. And while hours spent pouring over Finnegan's Wake did at times strike me as fascinating but frivolous, the time now devoted to analyzing the dynamics of conflict in various contexts can seem unremittingly relevant to the point of tedium.

I've always had a great admiration for career activists--people who seemed to be completely fulfilled and fed and inspired by working on the ground, day after day, to change things for the better. At the same time, those folks always seemed like the "other," in a sense, even after I spent five years doing grassroots nonprofit work. That passion for the concrete work of making things better is something I aspire to and have moments of, but not so much my default setting.

And of course being, for example, a poet and an activist are by no means mutually exclusive. I always defended the intensive study of literature as a way to look at how human beings talk about what is most important to them. And most great novels have some element of examining the interplay of the personal and the political/contextual. It's just that I'm still working on the integrative process on a personal level. How do I take all that beauty and theory and get it dirty? How do I hold the concrete forms of real life up in the light of aesthetics and emotion so I can appreciate their intrinsic luminosity? How do I decompartmentalize the world, dissolve that false barrier between the mundane and the transcendent (which, after all, is kind of a stodgy, enlightenment-era, Eurocentric, imperialist sort of orientation to the world on some level)?

I guess I'll consider that after I finish my paper. Sigh.

scavenger hunt

I generally consider myself an organized and responsible person. This weekend, though, I was a person who had three expired insurance cards in her glovebox, but not the current one...necessitating two extra trips from garage to home, twenty minutes of rifling through the aforementioned glovebox, a phone call to the insurance company, and the general testing of Drew's patience.

There was one scene that basically summed up the experience:
me: (rifling through pile of papers in the glovebox) "Oh--maybe this is it!" (pulls out insurance card with hopeful enthusiasm)
drew: "Did you find it?"
me: "Oh, no...this one is from 2006." (I start to put the paper back in the pile)
drew: (through slightly clenched teeth, but still lovingly) "Don't put that back in there...throw it away."

Alls well that ends well--my inspection is up to date and we are still happily married. It's just that I don't think of myself as a flighty, disorganized kind of person, you know? But in the context above, it's sort of hard to argue with that label.

Here's the thing...also in that glovebox: sweet note my mom sent me three years ago saying she was proud of the woman I'd become, book of matches from the "Hot Spot" in SC, where Sarah and I stopped and bought flip flops at midnight on our way home after being stranded in Atlanta for four hours with a flat tire, shiny lip gloss from when I visited Dublin in NYC two years ago, 35mm camera I got to take with me on my drive to California for my senior year of college with roll of undeveloped film still in it. And countless other random momenta (or detritus, if you're an unsentimental type).

A certain level of chaos in my life is what leaves me receptive to moments of magic and unexpected memory. If I always knew exactly what was going to be in a folder or a box when I opened it, I'd only remember certain things on purpose, when I decided to.

Not that any of this justifies the insurance card fiasco...there's nothing magical about finding an insurance card from 2006. He was right about throwing that away.

There is a theory that people will unconsciously leave things in places they want to return to. Perhaps my resistance to organized filing really a manifestation of my relationship to memory and an attempt to rebel against the pressure to live life as a linear narrative. Seems like the most likely explanation, right?