Andy Karr and Contemplative Photography

A year and a half ago, I blipped my adventures with a book called The Practice of Contemplative Photography, by Andy Karr and Michael Wood, Buddhist photographers. For the last two days Andy Karr has been in Portland, giving a workshop at the Japanese Garden. I'm still jet-lagged from the trip to Hawaii and not fully unpacked, but I wanted badly to attend this workshop, for which I registered before I even dreamed I'd be going to Hawaii.

I was shocked to learn Karr would be teaching at our Japanese Garden because in his book he says, "try to avoid parks, gardens, and natural settings" as such settings invite concepts about what is "beautiful." Contemplative photography is about avoiding concepts, focusing instead on pure perception of form, color, texture, and the light that paints them. After reading the book, I quit taking a camera to the Japanese Garden for more than a year.

I told him that today, and he laughed and said he dithered for months over whether to accept the invitation. "I knew it would be a challenge. But once I got here and took time to see it, I found that it's a garden of textures."

I had shot this mound of light and shadow, moss and tree detritus about an hour before he said that. I expect I like him and his book so much because his way of seeing is so familiar to me. He played two slide shows of his work, and I felt as though I was looking at my own pictures slightly heightened and intensified. He says he's not very interested in technique or equipment: he just wants to see and share flashes of perception, pictures of what he saw when he wasn't thinking. I get that.

I don't know when I will catch up with Blip and resume commenting. My best friend in Hawaii when I was 14 years old, who I haven't seen since we were 14 and who now lives in Minneapolis, arrives tomorrow. I no longer have pictures of the two of us at 14 (though I carried them around for years and didn't ditch them till I was downsizing to move to Oregon), but I can hardly wait to see her again. It will be interesting to observe in each other what has not changed. From emails over the last two years, it appears to us that quite a lot of who we were at 14 is still in place. I don't know if I'll be able to get a decent portrait of her, but I'll try. I'll come back to commenting when I can.