Going Beyond Boredom: Middle School Youth Explore their World at the 2013 WPD Gathering

Early last month at a retreat center in central Kansas, a group of 16 Middle School aged youth participated in a Contemplative Photography workshop.  I led the workshop, and was assisted by two adult volunteers who helped organize the event and supervise the participants, who ranged from 11 to 13 years of age.  The youth participants engaged in exploring their visual world and learned to express what they saw with a camera.  By the end of the day, each of them got the opportunity to share their images with the rest of the group in a digital slideshow, and gave supportive feedback on their sharing.

The goal of the workshop was to inspire these young people to be more curious about what is happening visually in their lives.  Taking the time to notice our visual perceptions takes openness, and it requires setting aside plans and personal agendas long enough to take in our experience. For this reason, the exercises used during this workshop were aimed at uncovering pure, basic seeing without concepts about what is “pretty” or “ugly,” and connecting with the world as it is.

The first assignment was to shoot ten images within a 10-foot square.  The location?  A corridor between buildings that offered brick, concrete, and occasional fall leaves scattered upon the ground.  Participants were encouraged to push themselves to keep looking, to photograph what they saw, and to stick within the boundaries they had been given.  After everyone had finished, the group gathered together to discuss what had happened.  I asked if anyone got bored or frustrated during the exercise.  Several hands went up, and heads nodded.  “Good!  What happened next?”  I asked if anyone noticed anything in the 10-foot square that they hadn’t seen before doing the assignment.  A few hands went up at first, then more.  I asked a few to share what they had seen.  By this time, the cold was becoming uncomfortable for several people in the group, so we relocated to the parking lot and into the warm sun.

In the parking lot, everyone gathered in a large circle.  I announced that we were going to look for color.  Whereas the 10-shot exercise begins to open our eyes to the world, the color assignment takes us deeper by further simplifying our intention.  The assignment begins with a series of slow, 360 degree visual scans of the horizon with the intention to look just at color.  With each rotation, the participants turned in place while looking with a gentle gaze at their surroundings, not labeling the objects they saw, but rather, simply noticing their color. 

It might seem that looking in this way has little to do with photography.  As adults, we tend to look at things through the lens of our habits and our preferences.  We are accustomed to filtering our experiences based upon what we think is interesting subject matter, what looks “good,” and what we want to see.  Even from a very young age, we begin to judge what we see based on our likes and dislikes, our ideas about what our peers find acceptable, and concerns about approval by our parents and caretakers.  For this reason, it can be very difficult to set aside preconceptions and simply see the world as it actually appears.  If we spend some time working with our minds and tuning into our visual perceptions first, then when we go out to shoot, we will be fresh and ready to take in our experience fully, with an open heart and alert mind.

After doing the color exercise, everyone split up and went off with our cameras.  The assignment was to shoot 30 photographs, looking for bold and vivid colors.  When the group met in the afternoon, we edited our images down to the best 5 to share in a final slideshow with each other.

I’ve created a gallery of some of these images online, to share the flavor of what the participants saw and photographed.  You can find the gallery by clicking here.  In looking at the images, you may be surprised by the vividness and the directness of their expression.  Contemplative Photography is simply concerned with the experience of seeing and whether or not that experience is translated to the final photograph.  The freshness of these perceptions is evidence of the state of mind of each photographer, at the moment he or she pressed the shutter.  I hope you will take a moment to pause, breathe and enjoy the images!

Cody Flory Robertson

Obstacles to Clear Seeing: An Essay on Contemplative Photography

The year is 2013, a time of social media, technological wizardry, interactive video games, and easy access to many forms of entertainment.  We are bombarded with news, music, movies, and advertising at a rate far faster than we can realistically take in and process in any helpful or meaningful way.  As a result, most of us are caught up in a speedy life, filled with disjunct bits of information, busy schedules, and very little time to “stop and smell the roses” so to speak.

With all the speed, there comes a kind of numbness.  Rather than actually experiencing our world directly, with our senses and an open mind, we tend to react in three ways: by accepting, rejecting, or ignoring.  Sometimes we like something, and want more of it.  “That game is so cool, my friends all have it!”  Or we really don’t like something.  “Man, that phone looks old, and it’s really ugly.”  Or, we ignore what is there completely and look right past it.  Most of the time, the things we ignore are not even on our radar for more than a second or two, so we don’t remember them.  If someone asked you to close your eyes and say what color shirt the person next to you was wearing, would you be able to answer?  Maybe yes, or maybe no!

So, what would happen if we slowed down and noticed our own accepting, rejecting, and ignoring?  We might discover that we have missed a lot in our everyday world, thinking it is boring, just not worth looking at.  But there is so much to see!  First, we have to be willing to pause and see it.  We have to realize that beneath our judgments about the world we live in, there is something new and perhaps quite wonderful to experience.  And it is right under our nose, almost literally.

The main problem, the reason we don’t see what is right in front of us, is because we have not been taught how to look.  When we see something that catches our eye, we often don’t take the time to really look at it because we are not accustomed to actually stopping to appreciate these experiences, even though they may happen all the time.  Through the practice of Contemplative Photography, it is possible to “get in the habit” of noticing more of these ordinary moments that normally pass us by.  Through noticing, and spending time with our visual perceptions, we can then photograph them and, if we wish, share them with others. 

So, how do we learn to look?  We begin by setting the intention to look.  What do we look for?  In this practice, it is useful to look for a basic element of form, such as color or texture.  When we set our intention to look for color, for example, we will begin to notice color in unexpected places and in new ways. 

We might notice the vivid orange of a dish in the sink, the texture of the soap bubbles hovering on the surface of the water, the way the light reflects softly from the window above.  Or, we might see the pile of dishes and think, “oh no, look at all these dirty dishes.  This is going to take forever to wash!” And then, turn around and look for something more interesting to spend our time on.

We always have this choice.  We can either look, see, and appreciate what is actually going on in our lives, or we can take a U-Turn down a path of familiar thoughts and judgments about the world we live in-- and miss our immediate experience entirely!

You may be thinking, “I don’t have time to stop and look at dishes in the sink!”  There are many important and practical tasks to be done.  But, what’s interesting is that these mundane tasks will actually be more enjoyable if we are present and aware as we do them.  

And the truth is that if we devote ourselves to the practice of looking and seeing, we will have all the time we need. 

To view photographs that express my own direct experience, click here.