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