Photography as Meditation

What IS meditation, anyway? It's a term bandied about, applied to many areas of endeavor, but, aside from specific forms, such as Transcendental Meditation (TM) it's a term that has a way of floating around and lighting on seemingly unrelated things like a wilting helium balloon.

I've practiced a couple formally-taught types of meditation myself. Such formal practices don't pin down all the mental processes to which the term might be applied. Upon contemplating the idea, I think a good blanket way of defining meditation is simply that it's a process of mindfully paying attention. By mindful, I mean learning to consciously note where your mind is going. The Buddhists speak of "monkey mind," which refers to the way that the mind has a way of drifting off in all directions, hardly controllable at all. Some forms of meditation involve noticing when the mind has drifted off, then pulling it back to focus on one thing, which can be an internally-repeated sound (mantra), on body sensations, or on something in the visual field, such as a candle flame. 

For many years I've enjoyed the practice of photography. I refer to it here both as practice, in the sense of simply doing it, but also in the sense of meditative practice, which is doing photography while paying conscious attention to where it takes me and where I take it.

There was a time when I considered the possibility of a career as a professional photographer. From present perspective, I feel very fortunate not to have taken that path, because it's left me free to photograph whatever I want or not to photograph at all if I'm not moved to do so. It's been interesting to notice where photography has taken me over the nearly sixty years that I've been shooting photos.

Having just written that phrase "shooting photos" brings me to an area of photographic awareness that only came to consciousness for me within the last two years. Somewhere on the web I encountered an essay about photography in which the writer pointed out that we use many terms of aggression when we describe the process of recording photos. We take, shoot, capture, grab, catch, snap, or steal, photos, to name a few examples. Ads in photo magazines often picture photographers using cameras with long, phallic-looking telephoto lenses, or they represent photographic subject matter with images that emphasize the giant staring-eye quality of a camera lens.

The essay set me to thinking about my own relationship to photography. Never having been forced by professional necessity to photograph anything in particular, or to photograph at all, I realized that most of the time photos actually capture me. I'll be walking along and the subject of a photo kinda clicks into view, which sends me reaching for my camera. At times I'll actively stalk photos, but even in that case, it involves walking around with camera in hand and no specific ideas, waiting to be grabbed by something.

Part of what makes photography a meditative pursuit for me is that it encourages me to pay attention to what grabs me.

Approaching the meditative aspect of photography from another direction, I believe it's useful to discuss what I view as the most important aspects of shooting arresting images. Or maybe it would be better to say, the most important qualities of mind and vision to cultivate in order to be arrested by scenes that capture attention.

Years ago I took a couple quarters of photography courses at the University of Colorado. My teacher, Charles Roitz used to talk about photos with a quality of "otherness." It took me years before I began to understand what that meant.

In practicing meditative photography I gradually learned two important and mutually allied skills, which extend to many other areas of life beside photography. One is learning to see the whole frame at once, and the second is learning to stop naming things.

Conventionally, when we "shoot" photos, the tendency is to take a picture of something, some named object: "Here's a picture of my car, my mother, my house, the rose in the garden," etc. We frame things, i.e. pick a named thing, put a frame around it, and call it a rose. The truth is, a photo is a pattern of color, light, and dark on a piece of paper. In a picture of a rose, there's a rose, then there's all the things around the rose, including the things that are outside the frame. If you stop naming the rose, see it as a blob of color and pattern, and let it fit into all the color and pattern around it, the subject of the image may become something other and quite possibly more interesting than what you expect. You might not even be able to name it because it's a feeling quality or something completely inexpressible, except as its own expression.

Similarly, in ordinary life we often trip ourselves up by naming something, stuffing it into a box, mentally speaking, then not noticing how it fits the big picture of all the things going on around it. To give an example, which happens to be uppermost in my mind in these times of economic disaster, a tendency in our culture has been to focus on the "bottom line" to the exclusion of all else. We've generally come to judge transactions by whether or not they make a profit for someone, with no consideration as to the effect the transaction has on the people involved or anyone else in proximity. It's a destructive and limiting way of living.

Hence, I assert that photography, practiced mindfully, can teach us many important lessons about ourselves and life, perhaps one of the most important being to become more sensitive to where our own feelings and interests carry us, rather than allowing ourselves to be seduced by ideas of what may currently be "cool" or acceptable.

Suggested reading: The Tao of Photography: Seeing Beyond Seeing  by Philippe L. Gross and S.I. Shapiro
For more photos see my Flickr site

Kevin Jones

Information Overload

There's a useful editorial by Mark Morford on the SFGate website this morning, discussing a subject I've thought a great deal about lately, namely information overload. Morford comes at the subject from a particular direction, upon which he pins the acronym "FOMO," or Fear of Missing Out. By coincidence, John Michael Greer, on his Archdruid Report  website (July 28, 2010 entry) touched on the same subject with a discussion about what information IS. He quotes Gregory Bateson thus: information is "a difference that makes a difference."

In contemplating the subject of information myself, I came up with the following definition: "Information is guidance." The hidden implication of that definition is that floods of information are useless unless they inform something, i.e. you gotta have an idea about where you're going in order for information to be of any use to you. If you're prone to randomly surfing the web, eyes glazed, sliding down breaking waves of raw data, chances are you'll find something that catches your eye here and there, and you'll while away hours tripping through a maze of links leading to who-knows-where. Before you know it, it's dinnertime, you're exhausted by the flood, and, after dinner can hardly muster the energy to watch a movie, much less to spend a couple hours reading a book.

Twitter and Facebook are probably the worst tweakers of Morford's FOMO syndrome. Has anyone organized Facebooker's Anonymous yet? From all I read, it seems like a ripe time for it. Nearly every business site I visit sports a logo somewhere: "Follow us on Facebook." "Follow us on Twitter." Thanks, but why should I want to? What will I be missing if I don't bother?

For a short time Mindport appeared on Facebook. We shut down our Facebook page after a few weeks because nobody wanted to keep thinking up trivial new nothings to post on it. As it stands, our blog postings demand a couple hours of thought and energy from one of us every week or two. I figure, if you're going to post something, it might as well be something that you put enough energy into to make it worth your reader's time.

Once I'd defined information as guidance, it clarified my relationship to the Web and alleviated the problem of information overload. You can surf the web out of boredom, looking for diversion. It can provide that for hours at a time, but what are you left with when you're done? Mostly fatigue. On the other hand, if you go at it with the idea in mind that information is guidance, then ask yourself the obvious question is, "guidance for what?" Or if you ask, "where do I want to be guided?" it lends focus to one's relationship with the Internet.  In other words, in order not to become a victim of info-blitz, it's helpful to approach the Web with filters in place, with intention in mind. For me, the process of determining a direction is best accomplished off-line, by paying mindful attention to my own internal workings. That leads to approaching the web in a similar spirit, with a focus on my own center rather than indulging in a diffuse tumble, eyes glazed, over undifferentiated waves of data.

Kevin Jones

A Plea for Silence

It's been almost two weeks since the Fourth of July holiday, yet loud explosions still rent the silence every evening, echoing across the mile of water between my home on Lummi Island and the Lummi Indian Reservation to the northeast of us. During the day, especially on weekends, motorcycles, some seeming not to be fitted with mufflers at all, roar up and down the hill in front of my house. Other times,  I'm treated to a constant background symphony of chain saws, weed eaters, lawn mowers, aircraft, and passing cars broadcasting booming bass notes from their open windows, sometimes audible from a half-mile away.

Why should I care? It's because I don't have earlids. The racket comes through whether I want to hear it or not. In an era obsessed with "property rights," I seem not to be permitted to enjoy the natural sounds emitted by the creatures on my property, the sounds of waves washing over the beach below my house, or even a conversation in my back yard, without interference from other people's noise.

When I was a kid my mother used to comment that so-and-so was making so much noise she couldn't hear herself think. Some might argue that this is just a figure of speech. . . but is it really? Maybe there's something to the idea that our thought processes cannot go on properly when interrupted by a constant cacophony of racket. Studies have proven that noise has a deleterious effect on our immune systems, on blood pressure, and generally increases our stress level. And this is true whether we're conscious of the noise or not. Our bodies react negatively to noise even when we're asleep.

Gordon Hempton, a well-known professional sound recordist who makes his home on the Olympic Peninsula, has written a book, in company with co-author John Grossman, on the subject of noise, or rather silence, which I heartily recommend to your attention: One Square Inch of Silence: One Man's Quest to Preserve Quiet. Hempton advocates preserving silence at a special spot within the Olympic National Park, the implication being that it will effectively control sound over a large surrounding area. The book is mostly an account of Hempton's pilgrimage in a VW van to Washington D.C. to meet with various government officials in order to convince them that the preservation of silence in at least one place in the United States is a worthwhile goal.

For me, the most interesting part of Hempton's book is the record of his progress across the U.S., with camping stops at a number of places I've visited myself, the most notable being the Red Rock country of Southeastern Utah. When I first visited there forty years ago, it was a quiet place indeed, probably one of the quietest places I'd ever visited. Nowadays the silence there is shattered by off-road vehicles, tourist fly-overs, and high altitude passages of jet aircraft. Hempton's comments about the impact of excess noise on these places is highly vindicating to me. Sometimes the campaign against noise has seemed like a lonely one, and it's good to know that there are others who fight this battle as well.

Hempton does a far more thorough job of making the case for silence in his book than I'm able to in this short blog entry. But I do encourage you to pay more attention to the sounds around you and the sort of impact they make on your consciousness. It's been my experience that anyone who objects to noise tends to be branded as a crank. The ability to endure noise without complaint seems to be a badge of manliness for some, to the point that I've become reluctant to object to rackets any longer, since it frequently has little or no effect, and usually creates more tension than it alleviates. My solution is to retreat behind a high-quality pair of noise-canceling headphones and listen to the nature recordings of Gordon Hempton and other sound recordists, many of whom can be discovered by searching for "Nature Sounds" on such sources as Amazon.com.

Outside of Gordon Hempton, one source of such sounds I especially recommend is Listening Earth - the website of Andrew Skeoch, sound recordist and Sara Koschak, photographer. They specialize in the sounds of the Australian bush, and other recordings made on their world travels. I recommend them because they document their work beautifully with both text and Koschak's fine photography. Also, they maintain a blog, complete with sound samples, which allows you to vicariously accompany them on their travels.

Check on my book list for references to "sound" for more suggested reading on the subject.

Kevin Jones

Big Problem

                                                     AnMorgan Curry

Contemplating the Exploratorium

I've been reading K.C. Cole's, Something Incredibly Wonderful Happens: Frank Oppenheimer and the World He Made Up. Oppenheimer was the founder of the Exploratorium, a San Francisco institution devoted to the exhibition of art and science.  The book makes for absorbing reading, both because I admire the Exploratorium and because I met Frank Oppenheimer a couple times, mostly through having been friends with his son, Michael for over 40 years. (Michael contributed our "LightWriter" exhibit.)

In my introduction to Mindport on the home page of our website, I mention the Exploratorium as having been one inspiration for Mindport. In reading Cole's book, I was intrigued to discover that some of Frank's stated intentions when he started the Exploratorium were startlingly similar to many of the ideas that we discussed when Joe Edwards, Robin Burnett (both since moved on to greener pastures), and I were forming the nascent Mindport in 1995. On one hand, I regret that I never had much conversation with Frank, but on the other, maybe it's well that I didn't, because he was a powerful personality and his influence might have derailed me from my own direction.

Michael Oppenheimer and I met in mid-60s, the two of us then employed as technicians at the University of Colorado, Laboratory for Atmospheric and Space Physics (LASP). He and I have done a great deal of talking about our childhood experiences, museums and education. He has worked for the Exploratorium and for a number of exploration-style museums in various parts of the country. Our mutual experience in this area over the years has provided endless material for discussion, and has no doubt had its influence on Mindport.

Ultimately, reading Cole's book led me to a re-examination of Mindport, born of very similar intentions to those which led to the Exploratorium. It interested me that the two organizations have evolved into radically different sorts of places, and I found myself once again curiously contemplating what Mindport has become, how we got here, where we might go in the future. . . and why.

One important factor that brought about the divergence of Mindport's evolution from that of the Exploratorium is the matter of scale. The Exploratorium's floor space is something on the order of 100,000 square feet, as compared to about 2500 here at Mindport. Our budget is correspondingly smaller, and our staff of eight is a mere fraction of the number or people (over 300) involved in the operation of the Exploratorium. Now and then, someone advocates the expansion of Mindport. My response is that I have no desire for Mindport to become bigger, that a staff of eight is about the largest size that can maintain truly personal relationships amongst themselves. This "small is beautiful" philosophy is crucially responsible for the congenial flavor of Mindport's public persona.

I haven't visited the Exploratorium for many years, but Cole's book confirms my impression that it's become increasingly focused on demonstrating particular scientific principles and exploring the science behind human aesthetic sense. It certainly seemed that way the last time I visited, which was about ten years ago. At Mindport, we've de-emphasized science instruction, per se, mostly because we find exploring WHY art affects us less interesting personally than the emotions and ideas good art actually succeeds in communicating. Personally, I don't care to analyse the mechanics excessively because it defuses the magic of the expression.

The Exploratorium is a huge and busy hall, situated in the hanger-like Palace of Fine Arts. While we both share in common that we characterize ourselves specifically as a place for all ages, at Mindport we take much different attitudes toward young visitors. Frank Oppenheimer believed children should be allowed absolutely free reign. If they broke things, his attitude was that it was the staff's job to fix them and make them stronger. Whether the Exploratorium still fosters the degree of "wildness" that it once did is unknown to me. However, at Mindport we discovered very early on that youthful energy is best kept contained in our own setting. In contrast to the Exploratorium, we are a tiny place, with a relatively minuscule budget, and the damage caused by "wild" behavior stretches our ability to keep up with repairs. Hence, out of necessity, we've come to regard Mindport as a quiet retreat, radically different than the sort of large-scale, high-profile operation personified by the Exploratorium. After long experience with children, sensory-overload, and hyperactivity, we're convinced that children need structure and to be taught a degree of restraint, both for their own happiness and that of those with whom they associate. We also emphasize specifically the importance of respecting other people's creative work. The Exploratorium under Oppenheimer apparently focused more on the content of the exhibits rather than their identity as pieces of creative work by individual artists, which is probably appropriate for an organization so much larger than ours.

The Exploratorium does admirable work, and it does it for a huge number of people. Having at one time felt overshadowed by such an example, especially since it initially served as an inspiration, I've been moved to examine the factors that influenced our evolution toward such different ends. To me, the ways in which the evolution of both living things and human institutions respond to environmental factors is fascinating to examine, especially since such factors are often discounted or not noticed at all.

As for the future, we're considering taking a more active role in education, much as the Exploratorium has all along. But our educational focus will necessarily be different, oriented toward a contemplative and holistic view of reality, rather than paying attention mostly to scientific disciplines. We're still discussing what specific form this program will take. Check the blog later on for further updates on this subject.

Kevin Jones

Old Mail

A postcard written by M.L. and mailed to Mr. Richard Metzger, postmarked September 24th, 6:30 pm, 1908.  M.L. hopes that Mr. Metzger is "catching lots of rats and are making money" and wonders how Mr. Metzger and "Edward divide them."  Hmm.  

I've been thinking about correspondence - particularly letter-writing - fairly often during the last couple of   years.  Many of the friends with whom I used to correspond by letter have turned to e-mail, Facebook, and the phone (a triumverate I term "the dark side" in gloomier moments), and I've been puzzling out my feelings about this change in media.  Why do I feel so sad that my friends don't write anymore?  Why do I still prefer letters to anything else and persist in writing them?  How does a letter writing relationship differ from one based on the phone or e-mail or Facebook?  What does the trend away from letter writing say about current culture, and dictate how historians of the future might "read" us?

I'm hoping to explore some of these questions in an exhibit at MP in the coming months, but in the meantime, here's an interesting article on friendship and Facebook.  If you have any thoughts about any of the above that you'd like to share, please comment here or send me an e-mail (tjones at mindport dot org) or letter!  I'd be delighted to hear them. 

     Faux Friendship by William Deresiewicz. 

T. Jones

Pipe Organ Progress Report

A few entries ago we posted news about the pipe organ that I'm presently building in my shop at home, where I built all the exhibits I contribute to Mindport.

Things are moving forward slowly. All 32 pipes are finished and laid out on the floor, more or less in the pattern they will be finally mounted. They'll be spaced out wider than you see them here, and mounted in two tiers, since their tone is affected by anything spaced too close to them.

Presently I'm working on the keyboard. Initially I'd intended to build all the keys from scratch, but after building the first key I thought- there must be a better way. So I went searching on eBay and came up with a set of keys salvaged from an 1888 vintage Weaver Organ, made by a now-defunct company that was originally based in York, PA. The set cost me $50 and will save literally weeks of work. Well worth the investment. Here's a picture of the inscription on one of the keys:

Still, the keyboard is proving to be a challenge. Devising a mounting scheme and installing the keys requires quite a degree of precision in order to get the spacing and alignment even. To add to the challenge, the keys are not perfectly uniform, so they'll need to be fudged a bit by sanding them here and there, and bending the pins that hold them in position once they're all in place.

The keys will be mounted on top of an airtight pressurized box, the "wind chest." Inside will be 32 "flapper valves" connected by thin wires to the ends of the keys. When you press a key, it lifts a small piece of wood from atop a hole leading to a tube, through which the pressurized air then flows to the appropriate pipe. In the photo below, all the white keys are mounted and now it remains to repeat the process with the black ones.

Of course the pressure in the wind chest has to stay constant no matter how many pipes are sounding, otherwise the tones would not be consistent, since the pitch and timbre change slightly according to pressure. Hence a device is necessary to accomplish that end. The air that drives the organ will be supplied by a blower whose output is funneled into a pressure regulator consisting of a diaphragm and a valve. As the pressure in the wind chest decreases with more pipes sounding, the diaphragm actuates a valve allowing more air to be admitted from the blower to compensate.

There's quite a bit to do yet on this project. As with nearly everything I build, the job turns out to be bigger than I anticipated. I'm glad that I opted to keep this instrument of minimal size, with only 32 notes. Once I do 32 of any part I'm grateful not to face another dozen or so. Also, as the notes become lower in pitch, the pipes become so large that they require a lot of expensive maple, not to speak of becoming physically unwieldy to build in my very small workspace. As you go farther up the scale, the pipes require more and more precision in order to arrive at proper pitch. So this is an optimum range for an instrument if it's required to be of manageable size and cost.

It's probably fortunate that previous to starting such projects I keep myself in denial about what will be involved. Otherwise it I might think twice about starting at all!

Kevin Jones