In December of 2018, I took a photograph of a letter addressed to the State Bar of California and posted it on Facebook with the following message: “This letter was just picked up by our mail carrier. Esquire no more. Time to use the other half of my brain.” With that declaration, I began living a very different life, one dedicated to “seeing” and taking great pleasure in the world around me. While I loved being a lawyer, I fully embrace the Japanese concept of “golden years” during which one might take up one of the Zen arts. My “Zen art” is photography: the art of seeing.
My spouse, Zan, and I love to wander -- on trails through the wilderness, on streets through inhabited areas or even on pathways through our home -- observing and enjoying the amazing patterns and colors that surround us. When one of us is intrigued enough to pause, we both explore our surroundings with our cameras and attempt to capture that unique moment in place and time. We refer to these spots as "nice rooms to explore," and I am convinced that each such "room" contains thousands of intriguing images just waiting to be discovered.
When I see something that interests me, I raise my camera to place a frame around my vision and then adjust the frame, in and out and from side to side, until it feels just right. This capturing of an image begins as a cerebral process examining the subject matter in the frame, but ends as an unfocused, visceral feeling of the whole that draws on my years of observing and enjoying art and nature.
A guiding principle for me is to take the world as I find it, with all of its delightful chaos. I do not “improve” the image by staging or even by eliminating a wayward twig. I only allow myself to adjust my angle of approach or scope of field. I also agree with the admonition I recently read: if you look through your viewfinder and the image looks familiar, do not take the photo. Rather, I try as best I can to have the image reflect a personal perspective.
Recently, I have come across the aesthetic concept of “wabi-sabi,” which is defined by Fredric Lieberman in Zen Buddhism and Its Relationship to Elements of Eastern and Western Arts as “the beauty of things ‘imperfect, impermanent, and incomplete’” and as encompassing seven aesthetic principles roughly translated as: asymmetry, irregularity (fukinsei), simplicity (kanso); weathered, basic (koko); without pretense, natural (shizen); subtly profound grace, not obvious (yugen); unbounded by convention (datsuzoku); and tranquility (seijaku). These are principles that resonate with me, and I hope and believe that they are reflected in my images.
I capture my photographic images primarily with my cell phone. My motto is that the best camera is the one you always have with you. And, I find that when I have a camera with me I see the world differently . . . knowing that I can capture an image at any time. Some might say that using the camera on a phone is not truly professional, but I disagree. No photo truly reflects reality, nor would I want it to do so. Rather, the most important part of any image, no matter what the medium, is its composition and only secondarily its subject matter and technique. Hence, I embrace the images that my phones can provided and find that they often are more painterly than those produced using a finely tuned lens.
My sole goal is to create images that I find compelling. My hope is that others will find in these images some of the magic I felt when capturing them.