This is what I mean about seeking the truth in a image. I’m referring to my previous post on Truth and Devotion in Photography and how the creative writing form of Haiku relates to Photography.
Photographer electrosmack1 was able to capture the truth in this image. Do you feel how it communicates instantly with the viewer?
This is what we should strive for as Photographers, an intimate and emotional relationship between the image and the viewer, instantly.
My wife and I make it a point to have “date” nights and we love to go bookstores on those very rare occasions. Of course, date nights only happen when we can get a baby sitter for the evening but when we do, we usually end up at our local Borders Bookstore. There we spend a few hours with a pile of books and magazines, drinking a cup of tea or coffee, and curling up in a corner somewhere. Last night, I curled up with the Haiku masterpiece, The Narrow Road to the Deep North and Other Travel Sketches by Matsuo Basho, and read something that resonated deeply within my creative soul.
I’ve always been a fan of Haiku, especially the old Japanese masters like Basho, Issa, or Bunson, because their three sentence 5-7-5 syllable prose evokes deep emotions inside me and transports me to a long forgotten time and place. In his book, Basho made two keen observations about Haiku and his writing that are deeply applicable to photography. He said that the essence of Haiku, and poetry for that matter, is to strip away everything in the prose and simply write the truth. This observation is about an artist’s external connection with the world and how he/she perceives it. Basho’s second observation is more about the internal nature of the artist when he writes that in order to be the best poet you can be, you must devote your entire life and time to it. What two wonderful observations I thought and great advice for photographers.
This bit of Zen like wisdom is something I’ve recently been contemplating when making my visual artwork and perhaps you should too. When photographing a subject, we should always strive to strip away all the extraneous “stuff” in our composition and photograph the “truth” of the subject. This is harder that you think and requires long and careful thought of your subject’s truthfulness, but the rewards are worth it. Lately, when I spend a lot of time thinking of my subject truthfulness the final image is often closer to what I saw in my mind. Interestingly enough, its those deeply contemplated images that seem to be more popular on Flickr and Photo.net, which means my art work has connected at deeper level with people.
Second, Basho believes that in order to be the best visual artist you can be, you should devote all our time and energy to it. This last bit of advice is easier said that done, especially if we create visual art on weekends or in the evenings after we finish our “day jobs.“ We typically have financially and time barriers and simply can’t devote all our entire time to photography, no matter how much we want to. So what can we do to implement Basho’s advice and grow as visual artists? Perhaps we can arrive at a Zen like compromise, if there is such a thing. Perhaps we can devote all our available free time to photography and work even harder at making the next piece of visual art and perhaps we can strive to become haiku photographers by seeking the truth in each image.
After rediscovering my creative photography life earlier this year (2008) and writing extensively for my successful Neural Market Trends blog, I’ve decided to create a new little space on the Blogosphere with Thomasott.net. From the desk of Thomas Ott is just a blog dedicated to my personal thoughts and essays on art, photography, expression, creativity, life, and family. I’ll try to refrain from politics and religion on this site, two art killing topics, but I can’t guarantee it! I welcome new and old readers to my site and look forward to writing about new creative endeavors. If you’ve come her from Flickr, be advised that I will migrate my photography work from there over the course of time and uploading my news images here first.