The Joy of Photography or The Joy of Seeing

“…the force which creates in a human being is he same force that creates the human being” (Albert Low ¹).

The Joy of Photography or the Joy of Seeing is based on the first-hand experience of people engaged in creative activity. First, I will use photographers’ metaphorical language to lend a voice to their creative journey. Metaphors are powerful tools. They reach beyond any particular domain or discipline, opening up a reality that would otherwise remain hidden. Then, without breaking the magic or mystery of creativity, we will talk about what we can do to release our innate creative intelligence and what makes us have the experience of joy.

Metaphorical language in photography.

For instance, Freeman Patterson ² says that what can be taught about composition is little. “The rest has to grow in you,” he mentioned in one of the workshops I had participated in many years ago. Aligmantas Kezys ³ tells us what is important is not the photograph but “…seeing and making others see by your photographs”. The emphasis is on reaching out to others and one’s surroundings. You may call it a reaching out to the world or to what is. “Developing your photographic eye” is another metaphorical expression. They all hint that there is more to photography than technique. This is not to say that the technical aspect is less critical. The better we are technically, the better we can translate our visual experience into photographic equivalents. Some are driven by a relentless desire to go out and take pictures again and again. They can’t rest in peace until they have done it. Darwin Wiggett ⁴ says all the creative photographers he knows have a strong inner drive and motivation for what they do. They may feel they are “prisoners of their passion”. Galen Rowell ⁵ describes this passion as the “inner rat. Its visceral, voracious power can drive us time and again to create new images – against all odds, like temperature, dangerous terrain, lack of food and the like. This may be experienced as a blessing and a curse”. I like the expression “being on fire” because it is a very dynamic way of describing one’s total involvement. Let me tell you another example, taken from my experience as a workshop participant: The setting was outdoors. It was interesting how our teacher selected his subject. He was pacing up and down “like an animal in a cage,” or was it a “dance”? The tension was palpable. I could not help but compare him with a highly trained rescue dog that “sees” by sniffing out life under a pile of rubble. One understood he was not guided by his eyeballs alone but by something inside himself that stirred in him that could not have been recorded by a camera. More recently, I came across an article in which the author talks about how much he was affected by his first experience of “Seeing Deeply”⁶ .

These encounters are vivid evidence of being “all eyes, ears and nose”. When the heart, mind and body are engaged, we are deeply aware of the world around us and see more than the eye of the distant observer can.

What makes metaphors a powerful tool is their ambiguity and vagueness. Their dynamic quality pulls us in different directions. We struggle with their open-endedness, creating tension and restlessness that urges us to resolve it. Many people have creative insights but let them pass because of the struggle to make them functional. If we succeed, it changes the quality of our visual experience and the quality of the images we create.

Joy and creative activity.

Research on how creative people live and work tells us that joy is experienced when they are in a state of flow ⁷ . It happens when one is deeply involved in an activity for its own sake – an experience everyone has at times. Creating something new is one of the most enjoyable activities any human being can have. Furthermore, the flow experience is described in almost identical terms regardless of the activity that produced it ⁷ . It has been experienced by photographers, athletes, and scientists and is part of religious and spiritual practices. Most importantly, ordinary people also describe their most rewarding experiences with similar words, and their descriptions do not vary much by culture, gender or age ⁷ .

What is flow ? You may wonder. Let me paraphrase what stands out: One is actively present, highly focused, sees clearly and confidently knows what needs to be done. One’s actions are felt to be effortless, and one forgets self, time and surroundings. Colloquially, we refer to it as “being in the zone” or having “a peak experience”. Flow is relatively independent and not under our control. In contrast, happiness and pleasure would be considered a distraction by the self. They do not participate in a process in which the ego or the sense of self has fallen away. Happiness and pleasure come back after the creative moment when we slip back into our old selves. Joy is an unexpected outcome of challenges in our lives that have the power to move and transform us. In contrast, happiness and pleasure don’t have the same depth. They are fleeting, more superficial and under our control. For example, happiness or pleasure can be a feeling that may accompany a favorite meal but vanishes soon after it is digested.

It is frequently assumed that the dynamic qualities of our experiences are psychological and emergent qualities of the brain. However, how these qualities are generated from physical or psychological processes has yet to be explained. Psychology gives us a better understanding of creativity and can describe the joy that comes with it, while neuroscience works with correlations. However, the cause of the expression of joy is neither psychological nor can it be explained by a correlation with brain activities.

In the next section, we’ll discuss a different approach to creativity and explore what causes us to experience joy.

The contemplative approach.

Based on a rich 2500-year-old introspective tradition, Buddhist contemplative practice stabilizes and clears our mind and facilitates creative activity for spiritual development and all creative endeavors, including photography. As Matthieu Ricard⁸ tells us, it shares with the sciences the ability to examine the mind empirically.

How does a contemplative approach work? It temporarily lands you in the present moment ⁹ by suspending your sense of self. Lowering the mast of your ego does not come without a struggle. In contrast to the approach used in psychology, contemplation is not about the content of your experience. It considers content to be an impediment, a distraction. For most of us, it is difficult to be free from the burden of distractions, like expectations, images, judgements, feelings, memories, concepts, random thoughts, etc. But they simply cannot be let go by good intentions, the strength of willpower, or the force of concentration. By forgetting the self, we create space which enables us to be objective with our subjective experience. It allows us to glimpse what is behind the screen of our sense of self, giving rise to direct perceptions. It is a process of transcendence involving novelty and discovery. Conflict and ambiguity dissolve in this dynamic and unifying transformation. What we gain is seeing the same for the first time, totally different but very familiar. It makes one wonder, “Why haven’t I seen that before? It has always been there”. We all have moments like that but miss them because our head is elsewhere.

An example of such a moment of selflessness is the flash of perception ¹⁰ . It happens when we are captivated by what we see and cuts through everything we imagine and think about. When we no longer “look” but “see,” we connect with what is in front of us – we see directly.

What generates the experience of joy?

Photography is just a concept that exists, for example, no more than “forest”. What does exist are trees. Trees are living and growing in forests. When you are actively present, your tree becomes a Tree, which now has a new dynamic quality that does not register on your camera’s sensor. The sensor is blind to the dynamic qualities of your experience. What the camera records is the physical form of the tree only.

Many people believe the actual photograph, the physical recording of the image, creates joy. It is the other way around. The joy is an expression of the introspective, dynamic movement of the mind that begins with tension and ambiguity and ends in a unifying, transformative moment of creativity.

Aligmantas Kezys ³ tells us what is important is not the photograph but “…seeing and making others see by your photograph”. Others are “made to see” not what you have seen, but they share the experience of joy by the same leap of creativity that generated your joy when you made the image.

Listening to Galen Rowell ⁵ gives us a taste of what he refers to when he says, “We produce our best pictures when we feel them oozing out of every pore of our body. The time seems to stand still, and the world is more beautiful than we have ever seen it”. He could have also said we have become one with the image by moving inwardly with it or by participating fully with our heart, mind and body.

Conclusion

If the joy we express in photography is due to a creative transformation, we should do it for the joy of it. There is no better reason for making pictures ² . The beauty or magic of this process is that any creative transformation may become a new ambiguity that may urge us, again and again, to solve it creatively – a process without end.

Whether you are a photographer or not, the joy we experience when we see creatively is the same joy we experience when tones become music and prose becomes poetry.

Notes.

1. Albert Low, Creating Consciousness. A study of consciousness, creativity, evolution, and violence. White Cloud Press, Ashland, Oregon, 2002, p.133.
2. Freeman Patterson and André Gallant. Photography for the Joy of It. Toronto:Key Porter Books, 2007.
3. Aligmantas Kezys, S.J. Form and Content, Morkunas Printing Co., Chicago, III. 1972.
4. http://www.jaygoodrich-blog.com/2009/06/where-does- your-creativity-come-from-by-darwin-wiggett
5. Galen Rowell. Nature or Nurture? 1997, http://www.mountainlight.com/articles.html
6. Bob Ginsberg. Seeing Deeply: How Much of What You See Actually Registers? www.beyondthefivesenses.com/post, Jan.20, 2020.
7. Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi. Creativity, Flow and the Psychology of discovery and invention, Harper Collins, e-book, 2013.
8. Matthieu Ricard and Wolf Singer. Beyond the Self, Conversations between Buddhism and Neuroscience; The MIT Press, Cambridge, Massachusetts, London , England, 2018.
9. Helmut Mohelsky; 2016, www.aboutseeing.com/articles/what-does-it-mean-to-be-present/?
10. Helmut Mohelsky.The Flash of Perception in Seeing With Your Own Eyes, Helmut Mohelsky, 2019, pp 12-13.