Photography and spirituality?

laur1 · August 3, 2013

That photo was simply meant to be my good-bye from this thread. It shows a thing coming to an end - the marks on the sand that will get erased by the water. I am surprised Julie had to ask if the water was coming or retreating - how could it have retreated while leaving the marks untouched? A bit of detective work would have helped more than art critique here. The description on flickr was irrelevant to the use of the image in the context of this thread - I linked to the flickr page because I always link to it so people can check image information. An image can be interpreted in many ways, but doesn't have any specific meaning - it can have an intended meaning, but meaning is assigned by people, it is not an inherent property of things. You can read many things into any image, but that says more about your imagination than about the image. Finally, one thing I was curious to see was how my post will be misunderstood. My comments in this thread were about being clear to avoid misunderstanding, so I was deliberately vague to see where things would get (and I also wondered whether an image is worth 1000 words). After several comments, Charles hit the obvious on its head - ask the poster what they meant rather than speculating on their intentions. All I meant was: good bye and don't forget that misunderstanding is easy.

charleswood · August 3, 2013

<a href="/photo/7463568">http://www.photo.net/photo/7463568</a>

To me this is a spiritual photograph because it touches on what I see as a spiritual theme: to thine own self be true; and underscores the point that being true to one's self is about the hardest and most painful thing that anyone can do.

charleswood · August 3, 2013

Fred earlier: Assuming this particular photo wouldn't work for everyone, rather than simply trying to approach the "meaning" of spirituality as theory, would it be of value for others to take a particular photo or a particular photographer (as Julie did) and talk about its spirituality, or in lieu of that, a photographic action or aspect of photographing that feels spiritual to you?

</blockquote>

In fact, I read Fred's invitation as an honest acknowledgement of some of your points and as a creative way to move have us all move, you included, the conversation forward.

So Laurentiu, I read Fred's suggestion as an invitation to continue, not as an invitation to say good bye. Now I find that your pictorial contribution was intended as a good-bye, and intended to add to the misunderstandings you had already pointed out and had asked us to be clearer about. I for one would have been happier had you responded by engaging, not by disengaging; and had you fully engaged, you would have saved me from publically thrashing around with my imagination in an effort to both understand your photograph and to get a better understanding of you; had you honestly responded to Fred's invitation, you would have saved me from some embarrassment and would have saved Julie from becoming grumpy for my part. Am I understanding you now?

charleswood · August 3, 2013

Julie - Going up rough access road that leads to communication towers at the top of a mountain, the bear crossed above me, a short way ahead of me. It did not know I was there; paused mid-road to snuffle something.

</blockquote>

Here in LA it is mostly concrete and there aren't any bears. But I'm concerned for your safety. Are you talking black bear or brown? Do you carry a repellant? Do you make plenty of noise as you walk? 50 feet, if I read you correctly, seems pretty darn close to be to a bear, but if its behavior didn't change for becoming aware of you I just read in bear safety material that that was OK and two years with one sighting seems safe. But... Do you carry something that you can throw down in front of a charging bear? For noise how about wearing some bells around your ankles that would ching chang with each step?

Julie H · August 3, 2013

Way OT here, but can I resist? Noooo .... I've been charged twice by bears. The most "interesting "is described here:

<a href="http://unrealnature.wordpress.com/2007/12/04/program-error/">http://unrealnature.wordpress.com/2007/12/04/program-error/</a>

The other is somewhere in this post:

<a href="http://unrealnature.wordpress.com/2008/03/23/where-are-the-bears/">http://unrealnature.wordpress.com/2008/03/23/where-are-the-bears/</a>

The only time I got photos (I usually don't carry a camera) is here (cubs with mother). The most interesting part of these pictures is what's not in them after the first shot -- the mother was somewhere in the vicinity, I knew not where ...:

<a href="http://unrealnature.wordpress.com/2009/04/23/the-un-bear-able-frightness-of-bears/">http://unrealnature.wordpress.com/2009/04/23/the-un-bear-able-frightness-of-bears/</a>

... and a more recent, funny encounter:

<a href="http://unrealnature.wordpress.com/2010/09/17/in-my-way/">http://unrealnature.wordpress.com/2010/09/17/in-my-way/</a>

In the summer, I carry a little dog bell so I can be heard (summer = mother bears, which are the ones I'm worried about; otherwise, even with the above described encounters, I don't fear the bears).

charleswood · August 3, 2013

(Thanks Julie I'll take a look soon at those bear adventures you linked to.)

I wrote: "Is this always the case with photography, that some unknown but independently formed intent is present in the photograph's creation?"

Sometimes I think there is an unseen hand at work, but perhaps more as Fred has said, in a body of work rather than in one individual photograph.

I'm going to attempt to attach a photograph of mine to this post. It shows the point at which I began to relate to my coyote subjects on a more personal level because of what I recognized in the expression of the mother coyote pictured. It doesn't show so I'll have to tell. The shot is the second of three. I'm on a bridge, have been hiding and waiting for her to come under the bridge near dusk. The first shot, not shown, she heard my shutter click and stopped and began scratching. (She had heard my shutter click very many times before.) The photograph show here: Before looking up at me, she stared off into the distance for what was an excruciatingly long time. Just when she least expected it: that tiresomely silly man again. Clarified for me was that she had more important things to do just then than to deal with my impertinence. From that exasperated mother's stare, and then from her slowly turning to look up at me, I recognized her as superior for being complete. That I had, as always, brought a stupid dog into her proximity: that for her just took the cake as to my foolishness in her eyes. I a fool? Yep, pretty much, in that moment with that man she had it right.

As to the unseen hand and a gestalt moment: that came more slowly and with much else. The more I watched the coyotes the more I understood that my dog hadn't acquired true canine culture. He had a lot of the behavioral pieces but none of them worked together in an entire set of integrated behaviors that could allow him to live independently. With the coyotes, each behavior was a part of an integrated whole. It took me a couple years to figure that out. And lately I've been asking myself how I have lived. Have I lived life more like my dog does, a disintegrated whole, or have I lived more as a coyote lives, where all coyote behaviors coalesce around imperatives that are part of nature and integral to their coyote nature where a coyote can't pick and choose from those behaviors, live just some of them, because if it did pick and choose, it would not be able to feed itself or its family. I can't yet be completely honest with myself on that score. But by intending one thing, some photographs, I do feel that in grappling with my subject matter, much more of myself has come into a kind of uncomfortable focus, and I wonder if that was part of a broader intent present that was not entirely of my own making. Human nature does involve choice in a way a canine's never can. I know we are a different species. Still, she got to me, that mother coyote, in a way I could never have imagined.<div></div>

charleswood · August 3, 2013

From Julie's <a href="http://unrealnature.wordpress.com/2010/09/17/in-my-way/" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">http://unrealnature.wordpress.com/2010/09/17/in-my-way/</a> "I was, as usual, in a zone." and " I saw a bear not thirty feet from me."

Just as I suspected. You are out lost in thought in bear country and I am not reassured. Isn't 30 feet from a bear way too close?

Although I don't have experience with bears, I seriously wonder. If others who do have experience with bears believe that Julie is in her habits entirely safe, or not, please advise us.

Julie H · August 4, 2013

Charles, to my reading, your posts seem to insistently circle two themes, one of which I think is spiritual and the other I (my opinion) don't. Here's what I'm thinking from what you've written in aggregate:

First, to my reading, it seems you're fascinated by the feeling that there's a different world or layer or place-of-being that is embodied by the coyotes you've been photographing. Some whole realm of the world that's been, is being, missed even though it's there/everywhere under/behind. I can't tell if you are trying to assimilate their world to yours or if you're trying to assimilate yours to theirs (which way is this empathy going?) or if you're trying rather for sympathy, which does not assimilate. The spiritual stance of a sympathetic (as opposed to empathetic) fascination seems to me to be perfectly said by Robinson Jeffers in his poem Credo:

.

My friend from Asia has powers and magic, he plucks a blue leaf from the young blue-gum

And gazing upon it, gathering and quieting

The God in his mind, creates an ocean more real than the ocean, the salt, the actual

Appalling presence, the power of the waters. He believes that nothing is real except as we make it. I humbler have found in my blood

Bred west of Caucasus a harder mysticism.

Multitude stands in my mind but I think that the ocean in the bone vault is only

The bone vault's ocean: out there is the ocean's;

The water is the water, the cliff is the rock, come shocks and flashes of reality. The mind

Passes, the eye closes, the spirit is a passage;

The beauty of things was born before eyes and sufficient to itself; the heart-breaking beauty

Will remain when there is no heart to break for it.

</blockquote>

Which (among many other things) is to say that the spiritual doesn't come "from" man; it's not ours to make. It is "indifferent" to use Sally Mann's word. It is man's vanity that makes "the God in his mind, creates an ocean more real than the ocean."

.

*****************

The aspect of your (Charles's) posts that seems to me to be not spiritual is to do with the above repudiated empathy, of inter-personal relation as being spiritual. While that's a huge/valuable/wonderful etc. component of much of photography -- much of the best photography -- to me, it's sort of the opposite of spiritual. It deals with the familiar, the common core and so on. Nevertheless, there's a way that it ties to your coyote project that is interesting (and possibly totally off; it's something I see in the pictures whether or not you intended it).

Animals can be thought of (from a vain anti-Jeffers perspective) as our most complete minority population. Sort of the ultimate minority. From that view, I borrow from Ta-Nehisi Coates where, talking about the African-American minority perspective in a recent post to his blog:

.

" ... power enables ignorance. Black people know this well. We live in a white world. We know the ways of white folks because a failure to master them, is akin to the failure of my classmates to learn English. Your future dims a little. The good slave will always know the master in ways that the good master can never know the slave.

"I think this is the seed of the "We don't have any white history month!" syndrome. Through conquest the ways of whiteness become the air. That is the whole point of conquest. But once those ways are apprehended by the conquered--as they must be--they are no longer the strict property of the conqueror. On the contrary you find the conquered mixing, cutting, folding and flipping the ways of the conqueror into something that he barely recognizes. And all the while the conquered still enjoys her own private home. She need not be amnesiac, only bilingual. The phrase "code-switching" is overdone, but there is no cultural code for white people to "switch" from. It's not even a code. It's just the world."

</blockquote>

.

If you take that view and apply it to animals-as-minority, then you get a blindness that I feel Charles trying to penetrate, though as already said, I can't tell if he's assimilating the animal's view to his own, or is giving them their own space.

[Don't worry about me and the bears. But thank you for your concern!]

Norma Desmond · August 4, 2013

Charles, your coyote/dog story sheds light especially on how subject matter can get under our skin and how viewing can be learning as well as how viewing others can be learning about ourselves. It can be unwitting, a pleasant surprise.

I'm also aware that my photos have been affected by things I want, and my photographing has had an affect on those things. I consciously moved away from lurking in shadows while shooting guys I found interesting. Feeling somewhat shady myself and even a bit lonesome and distant doing that, I made a focused decision to approach potential subjects and do fewer candid shots and more intentional portraits, with a desire to be more connected. Then I moved away from the Abercrombie and Fitch types and onto men of my own age, by design, with a desire to add some level of intimacy. Though I did it intentionally, I wasn't aware when I started how it would affect the way I would come to see my peers and then how I'd come to see myself through that process. I became much more interested, visually and emotionally, in my contemporaries and much less enthralled with and visually enticed by the guys Madison Avenue and Castro Street were telling me I should be looking at. I decided there was more visibility and sensuality in middle and old age than I'd been noticing and simultaneously felt I could make that older complex of energy visible while also creating some visible energy and sensuality myself, especially with the help of those who already were in touch with theirs. Strangely, in some regards, I started seeing stuff in the photos that I was only later able to start seeing in the subjects. So both the subjects and my photos of them were teaching me things and guiding me through a lot of changes.

As to the photo you chose above, thanks. Never would have thought of "To thine own self be true" and it might make a great title for what I have only titled "Untitled." In part, I like what the phrase expresses because it seems apt but not for any literal reason. It just seems a good accompaniment more than a good description. One thing the photo taught me is that a very ordinary moment can become extraordinary -- a moment transformed and never the same again -- by taking a photo of it and processing it with care. In that case, the photo taught me more than the subject did, though I still want to acknowledge the good graces and role of the subject in the photo coming to be.

charleswood · August 5, 2013

Julie, the sympathetic seems to be to be a bit out there, and I thank you for making those distinctions for me. In a nutshell, the coyotes for me embody a more grounded existence than I have been able to achieve, though the coyotes as grounded-ness has put my current grounded-ness at issue. That potential for my own growth either has intention or doesn't. Either way my personal view is that the process is natural, of this world. Your synopsis of my meanderings here is fair.

I didn't really follow the animals as the ultimate minority thing. Animals don't know they are conquered, that's where the comparison breaks down for me.

Julie - "I just have sense enough to know that the semiotization of an image pretty much kills the effect when mediated by a photograph." Which is my main takeaway from these discussions. On the other hand, I think Fred's, the one I put a link to, succeeds.

Fred thanks for all.

Norma Desmond · August 5, 2013

"Which is my main takeaway from these discussions."

Charles, since this sounds like a wrap-up, which makes sense at this point, can you say a bit more about this and the quote about an image mediated by a photo. I may not be fully understanding the quote, and since it's your takeaway from the overall discussion, I'd like to understand the basics of what the discussion has meant for you. Also, does it relate back to spirituality? Thanks.

charleswood · August 5, 2013

Julie was writing about having felt 'stopped' in her tracks by the sudden appearance of a bear and how the single image of a photograph, a photograph of the bear in that time and that place proximate to her, wouldn't mediate that event; a single image would pretty much kill the effect, the effect on her of that primal experience. If she wanted the photograph to precisely convey the substance of her experience of the bear, well, heck, it's a single image about which she says that she has the sense to know that a single image would scatter the effect, not focus it. A thousand words about her bear encounter would be better than one photograph, or a video containing a thousand images better than one image. Now I'm not trying to speak for Julie, I'm trying to state how I interpreted her. Bearing with my interpretation, I associate it to the deleted post from Keven Laracy: "All this talk of spirituality will lead you to start taking photographs of sun lit mountains, clouds with jesus figures in them, misty water shots, flowers with dew, kids looking skyward and pretty animals..." "Semiotization", the use of signs and symbols, in a photograph: when set about deliberately the use of signs and symbols does risk ending up where Keven says it will. Like Julie's bear, you just never know where the viewer of a photograph is going to go when the viewer starts snuffling around something in the nature of a sign or a symbol. The viewer can freaking go anywhere with their 'interpretations' as my post on the footprints photo contribution shows.

Speaking of raccoons, one came into my yard last night set upon eating my grapes. My dogs cornered it and set about trying to kill it. The raccoon wouldn't go along with that and the noise woke the neighborhood, I couldn't call my two dogs off, and I had to just about beat my dogs with a bat so that they would back off and when they did back off the raccoon made its getaway, all uninjuured. That's kind of what happens when we bring up the word spirituality. As Wouter wrote: "Just the word itself already, without consider what it could mean to someone." The raccoon is easier to understand than people, the raccoon just wanted to eat some grapes; the dogs exercising blindly for their own reasons, but without considering what those grapes might have meant to the raccoon. For the raccoon it was sustenance and I really could do better at understanding all the different ways that as honorable people we set about to meet out needs.

Norma Desmond · August 5, 2013

Thanks. Got it!

Yes, a photo and the subject of a photo are two different things. So, a photo of a sunset can come as an unimportant and uninspiring cliché even though the sunset itself was a joy to behold and transformed the person beholding it.

I tend not to think of photos as mediating the events, scenes, or people they portray, though there is a documentary aspect to photos that can't be ignored. But they are also the creation of new events, scenes, and visages of people. I rarely expect a photo of mine to convey the experience I had when shooting it. I think of the photo as a new experience, somewhat loosely or more tightly based on some experience I had or vision that was before my camera. What's before my camera can be just a means to create a new vision, one that I don't believe is yet there until the photo is complete. The memory aspect of photography is important, and it's only part of the story. I often don't think of photos as being about their subjects or the events they depict. Photos show me something framed by a lens and that framing gives a photo a very distinct and new kind of significance perhaps tied to but also separate from the original experience.

Shakespeare would likely disagree with some of your conclusions. And . . . you never know where a viewer is going to go with anything or any aspect of a photo. I don't see symbols as so special in that particular aspect of unknown viewer possibility. For me, symbolism and working with signs, in the right hands, can add a layer of meaning and relatableness and significance that can command attention and give things a double-meaning or deeper meaning worth pondering. What would Piss Christ be without it? How would film noir work? How could Hitchcock convey his wry humor without the train going through the tunnel in North By Northwest or without the two closeted homosexual protagonists' feet knocking each other as they cross their legs when they first meet in Strangers On A Train? That Romeo drinks his poison from a cup and Juliet stabs herself with a dagger kind of ties together the sexual and fateful aspects of the star-crossed tale. These symbols add texture. Shakespeare, Hitchcock, Serrano, Robert Frank, and so many others don't end up where Kevin's assessment may have.

Kevin's examples are important and insightful not because they're symbols, IMO, but because they're clichés.

It's also important to take into consideration how well done they are. A lot of overt attempts at conveying spirituality are simply ham-fisted and just not very good photos. But that's, of course, true of all kinds of photos regardless of their spiritual nature. IMO, the problem is often simply one of the effectiveness of the photo itself, not a generic matter of whether it uses symbols or signs or is motivated by spirituality or any other human emotion, aspect, or quality.

I think authenticity and genuineness play a more important role in expressing something spiritual or expressing love or fear or sexual energy or hatred or anger or desire or what have you. One can usually see the difference between an authentic use of a symbol and an exploitive use of one and one usually intuitively knows if either of those uses works within the given photo.

Norma Desmond · August 5, 2013

Also . . . photos don't often and certainly don't have to literally mediate the experience one has when taking the photo, yet they can still express a lot about those experiences. Photos are not so much a translation of experience as they can be a transformation of experience. We don't always gain knowledge through photos. When a photo is good, however, we often experience ourselves a wave of energy that travels through time and space, or at least seems to.

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