Stephen Batchelor
Stephen Batchelor is a British author and teacher, writing books and articles on Buddhist topics and leading meditation retreats throughout the world. He is a noted proponent of agnostic or secular Buddhism.
Stephen Batchelor has been taking photographs since the age of sixteen. Before becoming involved in Buddhism, he had intended to pursue a career as a photographer. He abandoned photography on becoming a monk in 1974. He resumed it when he went to Songgwangsa Monastery in South Korea in 1981. From then until his return to the West in 1985 he took hundreds of colour slides in Korea, Japan, China and Tibet. In 1986 he returned to Tibet to write The Tibet Guide (1989) (see Publications) and provided many of the photographs for the first edition of the book. More recent work is found in Martine Batchelor’s Meditation for Life (2001) (see Publications), for which he provided sixty colour and black and white images. Buddha Mind in Contemporary Art, edited by Jacquelynn Baas and Mary Jane Jacob (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004) includes Stephen’s essay “Seeing the Light: Photography as Buddhist Practice.” An abridged version of the following essay appeared in Meditation for Life.
Taking photographs and practising meditation might seem at first glance to be unrelated activities. For while photography looks outwards at the visual world through the medium of a camera, meditation focuses inwards on unmediated experience. And whereas photography is concerned with producing images of reality, meditation is about seeing reality as it is. Yet in taking photographs and practising meditation over the past three decades, I find the two activities have converged to the point where I no longer think of them as different.
As practices, both meditation and photography demand commitment, discipline and technical skill. Possession of these qualities does not, however, guarantee that meditation will lead to great wisdom any more than photography will culminate in great art. To go beyond mere expertise in either domain requires a capacity to see the world in a new way. Such seeing originates in a penetrating and insatiable curiosity about things. It entails recovering an innocent, childlike wonder at life while suspending the adult’s conviction that the world is simply the way it appears.
The pursuit of meditation and photography leads away from fascination with the extraordinary and back to a rediscovery of the ordinary. Just as I once hoped for mystical transcendence through meditation, so I assumed exotic places and unusual objects to be the ideal subjects for photography. Instead I have found that meditative awareness is a heightened understanding and feeling for the concrete, sensuous events of daily existence. Likewise, the practice of photography has taught me just to pay closer attention to what I see around me everyday. Some of the most satisfying pictures I have taken have been of things in the immediate vicinity of where I live and work.
Both photography and meditation require an ability to focus steadily on what is happening in order to see more clearly. To see in this way involves “shifting” to a frame of mind in which the habitual view of a familiar and self-evident world is replaced by a keen sense of the unprecedented and unrepeatable configuration of each moment. Whether you are paying mindful attention to the breath as you sit in meditation or whether you are composing an image in a viewfinder, you find yourself hovering before a fleeting, tantalizing reality.
At this point, the tasks of the meditator and the photographer appear to diverge. While the meditator cultivates uninterrupted, non-judgemental awareness of the moment, the photographer captures the moment in releasing the shutter. But in practice the aesthetic decision to freeze an image on film crystallizes rather than interrupts the contemplative act of observation. Aligning one’s body and senses in those final microseconds before taking a picture momentarily heightens the intensity and immediacy of the image. One is afforded a glimpse into the heart of the moment that meditative awareness might fail to provide.
“To take photographs,” wrote Henri Cartier-Bresson, “is to hold one’s breath when all faculties converge in the face of fleeing reality. ... It is putting one’s head, one’s eyes and one’s heart on the same axis. ... It is a way of shouting, of freeing oneself, not of proving or asserting one’s originality. It is a way of life.” These words of the renowned French photographer define photography as an ongoing meditative relationship to the world. For Cartier-Bresson, photography is not merely a profession but a liberating engagement with life itself, the camera not just a machine for recording images but “an instrument of intuition and spontaneity.”
To be moved to take photographs, like being inspired to practise meditation, is to embark on a path. In both cases you follow an intuitive hunch rather than a carefully considered decision. Something about “photography” or “meditation” draws you irresistably. While you may initially justify your interest in these pursuits with clear and compelling reasons, the further you proceed along their respective paths, the less you need to explain yourself. The very act of taking a photograph or sitting in meditation is sufficient justification in itself. The notion of an end result to be attained at some point in the future is replaced by an understanding of how the goal of photography or meditation is right here, waiting to be realized each moment.
Both meditation and photography are concerned with light. Meditators speak of “enlightenment”: an experience in which “light” metaphorically dispels the “darkness” of the mind. Similarly, by means of an odd angle, an unusual arrangement of light and shade or an adjustment in the depth of field, a photographer illuminates something about an object which had previously been unnoticed. Such photography has nothing to do with preserving a pictorial record of things, places and people that are already familiar. It opens up the world in a startling and unexpected way that can be both compelling and unsettling.
The photographer’s concern with light is also a real one. For with insufficient light, one simply cannot take a photograph. Yet the closer you attend to what is seen in the viewfinder, the more you notice how the light which illuminates and the object being illuminated are not two separate things. An object is just as much the medium through which light becomes apparent as light is the medium through which an object becomes apparent. You cannot have one without the other. In taking a photograph of an object, you are taking a photograph of a condition of light.
When this separation between what illuminates and what is illuminated begins to dissolve, it becomes increasingly difficult to regard the object being photographed as a thing existing in its own right “out there.” As soon as you make the perceptual shift to seeing the object as a condition of light, what you observe becomes as tentative, shimmering and luminous as light itself. In paying more attention to the display of light rather than “something” illuminated by light, photography starts to move away from representation towards abstraction. The photographer becomes absorbed by the restless contrasts of line, colour, shading, what is in and out of focus to the point where the object as a recognizable “thing” disappears.
This is where the path of photography has led me at the time of writing. My photographs, taken over many years, reflect various stages in this journey. They also mirror my engagement with the process of Buddhist meditation. For both paths have served to deepen my understanding of the fleeting, poignant and utterly contingent nature of things.
Infomation gathered from...
https://www.stephenbatchelor.org/index.php/en/photography-and-meditation
Resource Magazine Article
MEDITATIVE PHOTOGRAPHY: HOW FINDING YOUR ZEN CAN IMPROVE YOUR ART
ELISABETH HELEBAFEBRUARY 28, 2018
On February 13th, photographer and educator David Ulrich published his book, Zen Camera: Creative Awakening with a Daily Practice in Photography.
Ulrich’s philosophy revolves around the idea that “Creativity arises from stillness”. This theory has been the foundation of his classroom as well as his photography since the 1970s.
At first, this mix of meditation and photography might seem a little silly. Images of fourty-year-old women mumbling “ohm” on yoga mats might come to mind. You might think that you simply don’t have time to engage in a meditative lifestyle. The world is fast paced and, as an artist, god knows you have to work fast in order to survive.
But meditative thought could be essential to the way that you go about photography; it could renew and focus your perspective, and make you more effective with your art.
Ulrich believes that the most significant failure of modern times is that we are all too distracted. You know this. You know that you spend too much time on your phone, and you keep convincing yourself that you’ll pull away, but what then? You’d feel like an outcast!
Distraction has become an integral part of society, and we’re all aware of it. Many of us have accepted it, but Ulrich has warned against this train of thought. When people are too willing to submit to a distracted mind, they will keep themselves from reaching their highest potential in art and critical thought.
So in order to truly grow as artists and students, we can’t be passive learners. We have to be able to take a thought and turn it over and over again in our minds. We have to be able to sit and think about one thing for a long period of time. This stillness, this ability to think and contemplate, is key to Ulrich’s philosophy regarding photography.
Ulrich’s novel teaches the reader how to avoid passive sight. He teaches his students to go out and truly take in their surroundings. To not just take the picture, but contemplate why the image has affected you. He also teaches the “TMP” method, which stands for “Take more pictures”. The most effective artists are the ones who practice their hand every day, and develop a deft sight for what inspires them.
When you know what inspires you, the composition of your images will come easier. More clearheaded and aware, you’ll be able to sift through the complexities (the meaning behind the piece, the motivation behind the image), and take images that are true to their form, and true to how they make you feel.
So even if you’ve never been interested in yoga or calculated breathing, bringing meditation to your photography could be worth a try.
You can learn more about Ulrich’s philosophy on his website.
Feature photo by Kalen Emsley on Unsplash
http://resourcemagonline.com/2018/02/meditative-photography-how-finding-your-zen-can-improve-your-art/86579/
How is photography meditation for me?
Photography and meditation are two things that I practice together and separately. Much of my photographic practice involves going into the landscape alone and isolating myself from everything that is going in the outside world. It is easy to lose track of time and I find myself in a state of inner peace much like when I am meditating. I find that I am purely living in the moment with no distractions, constantly observing what is going on around me. This is when I put the camera to my eye and make photographs. Capturing moments of light falling on the natural world that is around me. Taking photos, for me, is a relaxing process in which I find myself escaping away to do. It is a personal way of expression and documenting the places that I have been in. Photography also makes you take the time to stop, and appreciate the moment that you are living in. You become mindful to every detail of the natural space that you are in, the shapes, colours, tones of light. This moment is transferred into meditain. When you take time out of your day to reach in, to move your mind away from your busy life and into a mindful mindset from within. The focus in on your breathing, and unlike photography you are reaching towards a metaphorical or mental light that takes away any negative thoughts you may be having. Similar to photography how you are contsantly looking for the perfect light on your composition.
The project that I am working on at the moment is captured reflections of a mental state that I am currently in. The feel and need to escape away into big isolated places away from the current state of the world that we live in. Much like when I take the time of my day to meditate. It is to reach within to that inner peace, the light that removes a physical superficial and replaces with the truth.