Over the last four weeks, we have been exploring light and dark as physical properties of a photograph, lived emotional experiences, and as a metaphor for seeing and not seeing. In week three, we learned the doorway to any contemplative practice begins with humility and wonder. 

Last week, Tom Rankin's essay The Cool Radiance of the Obvious encouraged us, with humility in hand, to expand our sense of what is worthy of our attention. And further, the role that words play when trying to make meaning of our photographs. How much room do you make for silence in your practice? 

For Eggleston, photographs emerged from silence. Images were their own language. When pressed to make meaning of his photographs, Eggleston responds, "Whatever it is about photographs, it's just about impossible to follow up with words." Photography was a sensual and embodied experience that arose from direct engagement. Here, observation and image-making become a form of phenomenology, a complete and whole gesture. 

One of the most outstanding students and teachers of phenomenology was the polymath Johann Wolfgang von Goethe. Although better known for his poetry and plays, Goethe spent the years from 1777 until he died in 1832 engaged in contemplative scientific and artistic exploration. For Goethe, any contemplative practice needs to include the following:

observing with patience and rigor (using perception to see the form);

deepening a sense of wonder to the world (using imagination to perceive its mutability):

cultivating sensual and emotional awareness to experience phenomena as fully as possible (inviting inspiration to reveal the gesture)

noticing and attending to connections between phenomena (using intuition to both combine and go beyond the previous observations).

Goethe believed that the final instruction, noticing and attending to the connections between phenomena, required two intertwining practices; seeing and beholding, and being one with the subject.

First, the practice of seeing and beholding asks us to look deeper. By joining intuition and heartfulness, the object becomes subject, and we make space for it to reveal itself. Through patience, wonder, and the cultivation of our sensual and emotional awareness, we can quite literally open up new organs of perception. Our everyday consciousness expands to include new ways of seeing. Seeing and beholding arises within the space of our new awareness, and we experience the subject as alive, unique, and present. The photographer and the subject create a dialogue, revealing something new in the conversation. The photographer is no longer pushing, controlling, or manipulating the subject but instead is responding with mind, body, imagination, and heart moment by moment. 

Through this unique and radiant sense of connection, the second practice, being at one with the subject, arises quite naturally. Like any great conversation, you lose track of what is yours and what is theirs. Instead, you experience a mutual unfolding and connection that fosters a feeling of creative flow and belonging. 

So what does this have to do with light and dark? 

Through photography, contemplation creates an open space where spirit (light) and matter (dark) can meet. IN this open space, the sensual ground of unknowing and the creative light of awareness come together.  I often imagine my film or sensor as the sensual ground of unknowing, and the light of the subject as a kind of create awareness. The resulting image is a synthesis of this fundamental phenomenon, lending both depth and beauty to life.

Like Eggleston, for Goethe, cultivating silence was essential to any deeply creative practice. By letting go of names that are too small to hold our experiences, we challenge our limiting beliefs, liberate our imaginations, and return to a sensual, dynamic, and gestural relationship to life.

In the words of the American Trappist monk Thomas Merton:

When I am liberated by silence, when I am no longer involved in the measurement of life, but in the living of it, I can discover a form of gestural prayer in which there is effectively no distraction. My whole life becomes prayerful movement. My whole silence becomes full of life.