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Friday, September 1, 2006

Yogic Photography

Posted by on September 1 at 14:42 PM

Last night’s Portland artists talk was … interesting. Because there were several artists and a slide show is no way to get to know an artist’s work anyway, it was instead a conscious proposition about the personality of Portland’s art scene, led by soft-spoken den-mother-curator Stephanie Snyder (of Reed). There was so much talk of breaking bread and community and dreaming and feelings that one friend of mine described it as a hippie Heaven’s Gate meeting. Maybe I was feeling misanthropic?

On the other side of the ledger for PDX is this piece I like very much by Matthew Stadler in the issue of Visual Codec out today.

He describes the methods of Portland photographer Shawn Records in opposition to the cooked-up, accumulated objects of Gregory Crewdson, Jeff Wall, or any number of contstructive photographers. In “yogic photography” such as Records’s, Stadler writes,

The photograph emerges from the body and camera together in the world, a kind of emanation of living, like breath or memory. Here, the camera remains central. The photographs of Ari Marcopoulos, to cite one example, are shaped with such clarity and transparency that one feels no distance between the object and its making. To encounter such a photograph is to witness its making. … These are not the secondary documents of an interesting mind. Their pleasures are not voyeuristic. They are, instead, evidence of the marriage of photography and seeing—as brilliant, refined, and masterful as the breathing of a yogic teacher. … Shawn Records … carries two cameras—a Mamiya 7 and a Pentax 6x7, both medium format cameras, one a rangefinder, the other an SLR—and responds to what he sees by using them. His habit is to photograph without much intention; he rarely knows what he is looking for, but he often finds it. For Records this practice rests in a habit of seeing without much desire. Records does not hunt for the perfect moment of, say, a Cartier-Bresson, but instead scans for landscapes of information stripped of any single organizing drama. … He is able to achieve his astonishing results only by freeing himself and his camera of the compulsion toward meaning.

I have no idea whether this is the only or the best way to talk about Records’s work, because I don’t know the work at all. But as with much memorable art criticism, the idea—a photographer whose eye, lens, and body are directed by a lack of desire—is worth thinking about beyond this artist.


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Kant's already done a fair bit of that sort of thinking.
What might still be worth pondering is what the yoga bit adds as a specific praxis of bracketing intention and desire.

Presumably one has to practice this imperfectly to actually work as a photographer, because the epitome of yogic photography would be the photo that is never taken, perhaps a photograph of the bird that is the epitome of natural beauty for Kant: the parrot.


This isn't a new way of working, and only a slightly different way of describing this process of working. Relationship between the act of photographing in this manner has been drawn to Zen Buddhism for decades. Look at the work of Lee Friedlander for a huge and amazing primer.

I don't mean to downgrade Matthew's essay or Shawn's photographs in any way. Glad to see both. I think Shawn's work is great. I would love to see more writing and exposure in the Northwest to many of the truly great working photographers.
This region is sorely lacking in that realm. Seattle probably more than Portland. Lee Friedlander was born in Aberdeen, for Chrissakes! And, trust me, he has a hell of alot more to offer than Nirvana.

Just thought I'd share Shawn's site URL for any who haven't seen it: http://www.shawnrecords.org

(V. interesting angle on thinking about photography...)

I think the hippie haven bit is not so off the mark as you might think...in certain circles only though, like any place.

Individuals over groups get me everytime. nothing changes the landscape like one crazed individual. The very idea of 'community' makes my skin crawl.

Signed, Portland artist

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