I AM A CAMERA – May 16, 2013

by admin on May 16, 2013

Discovering the Unique Shape of Our Lives Through Words & Images

If you listen to anything, it will have a story to tell…
                            –Siena Shepard, 16 (from “Evolution Through Observation”)

Photographs are transmission.  Communication from the place where a photographer’s inner life meets the outside world. A photograph is an impression of how a person relates and responds–in a present and “decisive moment”–to the outside world. Thoughts, feelings, states and depth of mind are all encoded and transmitted through the image. Learning to receive this transmission and to creatively respond in our own words and voice is the aim of a course I created and now teach in Sonoma County, California called I AM A CAMERA: IMAGINATIVE WRITING & THE IMAGE. 

Certain images, like certain people, speak to us close to the bone of our own truth. When we meditate on an image, the photographer’s revelation can reveal something unique us. When we’re open to an artful image, a possibility arises of being compelled and touched in a way that calls us to answer with an aesthetic response. That heart and soul reflex, responding to art with art, is the main focus of I AM A CAMERA.

I recently taught this course at the Summerfield Waldorf School in Sebastopol and will be teaching a fuller version there again in the fall. I’ll also be introducing the course to high school students at Sonoma Academy in Santa Rosa for the first time in September. Ultimately, the point of the class is to encourage students to contact the truth and heart of their experience. I hope that whatever images they choose speak to them as inspiration. Through their writing, I guide them to find a greater sense of aliveness and a deeper trust in the unique shape of their individual lives and voices.

The most recent Spring 2013 course ended this month with the printing of a book of student work and a spirited reading for parents, students and others from the Summerfield community. The 13 to 17 years old who read were inspired by portrait and landscape images by photographers Charles Clifford, Eugene Atget, Edward Steichen, Robert Frank,  Arthur Tress, William Eggleston, Sally Mann, Larry Schwarm and myself. One high school student, Lili, who traveled with her parents in December to Hong Kong, China and India used her own images as inspiration to write poems, simple descriptions that deepened the context of her trip.

Other students simply chose images that inspired them. Siena,16, was so enlivened by images of fire burning mysteriously and beautifully across prairie lands, that she wrote a fiery essay called “Evolution Through Observation.” She takes us on a journey of the basic elements–fire, water, earth, air–in clear, crackling language full of emotional and existential associations. It’s an essay about life, death, renewal and revelation: “There is a fire, and you stand next to it, feeling everything.” Photographs of a garden and interior of a church sparked 16 year old Salma’s imagination to take a historical-existential view in two vignettes. She described the past life of an empty garden and an endless stream of prayer throughout centuries of social, cultural and spiritual evolution. In the latter piece, her haunting words seem to echo out from the daguerrotype that inspired her, through the columns and cathedral ceiling of a church: “And they prayed even while Muhammed stood outside Mecca and fought, as the students of the revolution stormed China’s temples, as the Hebrews took step after bloody step out of Egypt, as Aurangzeb smashed calm-faced Hindu idols and the Buddha starved his way into enlightenment beneath a tree.” Another 11th grader, Megan, responded to a photo I took of tall grass and a tree on a distant hill with a sensational description of what it feels like to be alive. And she ends the piece open and questioning: “I am curious and haunted by the brilliance of nature. I wonder, What could it teach me?”

Younger participants wrote concrete stories of loss and letting go, fear and hope.  Ivy, an 8th grader, was moved by the surreal photographs of California photographer Arthur Tress to write two deeply-felt stories about letting go of a place that “used to be full of life” and saying good-bye to best friends on the top of a batting cage. Isaias, also in the 8th grade, chose a photograph of roots disappearing in a fog from Sally Mann’s Deep South series and wrote a scary and impassioned piece, “Alive and Crawling,” about a former soldier who finds himself lost in a poisoned swamp of mutant wildlife.  In the end, he “pushed forward into the darkness, hoping, just hoping, to see the light of day once more.”

 

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OUR LIVING IMAGES – March 8, 2013

by admin on March 8, 2013

This past Monday evening I met with students, psychotherapists and interns in an intimate classroom setting at the California Institute of Integral Studies to share a multi-media presentation called Alone Together: Words & Images On the Value of Being in Relationship. I invited audience members to be a witness to my psychological development through photographs. I asked participants to consider the images I made as a documentary and fine art photographer over an 18-year period of my life as inner experience. And to bring their attention, as listeners and seers, to simply being with the images, without interpretation and analysis, as a living experience in the present moment.

With Alone Together I selected images to show—rather than tell—the story of the process of my inner development, transformation and integration. I used this period of my life, from 19 to 37, as an example precisely because it’s an inside view of growth. The images, when considered in this way, show a clear movement from fragmentation to greater wholeness, from isolation to intimacy, from fear to freedom. I hoped seeing that movement would be invaluable and influence others to consider the images and unfolding of their own lives.

Inner growth is often difficult to see in real time, because real time is simply present time. And growth, in general, is cloaked in the ordinary circumstances and experiences of our outer lives. Change is slow and subtle. And, even when we do change, we often forget and take for granted how far we’ve come. That is to say, we have difficulty re-imagining the past, how we once were. Often we simply don’t look back. I hoped showing images of 18 years of experience in 22 minutes made the growth and change obvious.

Within the stream of photographs, there are repetitions of images, feelings and meanings. One of the most obvious symbols and patterns I noticed was the way I symbolically photographed birds. I was 19 the first time I made images of birds in cages. At 28, you see birds in cages hung in trees and bird-sellers in a marketplace. A few months later, there’s a man throwing up his hands, freeing birds over a river. They make a perfect halo high above his head. And, at 35, you see images of a lone bird flying off a wire lined with perched birds and of a cloud of birds flying through the sky. Without pinning a specific meaning to this sequence, there’s a clear repetition and unfolding of imagining.

We’re not used to being in space where there is no language. This is part of the experience of being in psychotherapy, where we grasp for, try to see, what can’t often be spoken. I invited the audience’s participation into a living experience. The photos were taken all over the world, under specific circumstances, though I didn’t give any context. Only my age separated each series. The images were shown in silence. No words.

After the slideshow, I invited responses to the images. There was consensus among the group about seeing a clear transformation in me over time. Some participants said they felt a strong tendency to interpret, analyze and inquire into the meanings and specific contexts of the images. Two participants noted it was difficult to consider many of the photographs, which often represented other people’s lives—like prisoners at the Louisiana State Penitentiary—as a record of inner experience. Another noted how his experience of inner and outer reality kept flipping back and forth, as if he were standing in front of a revolving mirror.  A psychotherapy student expressed a similar feeling about the difficulty of holding together inside and outside experience.

There were more unique responses. One participant said she got a deep sense of time passing, was in touch with the ephemeral nature of life, her own images flickering before her like a biopic. A student noticed that there was a particular shift from 32 to 33 years old, and wondered had anything significant changed in my life. For him, he said, the images after 33 were more peaceful, open and free.  Another student said she had noticed a gradual transition from images of rubble and ruin to lush images of the natural world. Others reflected on their own lives and felt inspired, more in touch with their own images, including the characters and figures of their internal world. One young man described imagining more fully his present life, including the state of his relationships, and where he sees himself going from here.

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FIGURE & GROUND – June 7, 2012

June 7, 2012

The aim of therapy is growth through relationship. Transformation happens when we allow space for something new. Any emergence or form, like a seed sprouting from the earth, creates a foreground and background in all directions. In therapy this can be a pressing feeling against the backdrop of all other feelings, a particular image discovered in [...]

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