I have been taking photographs for most of my adult life. With no technical knowledge of F-stops or apertures or how to work with light and shadow, I have still stumbled into taking some fine pictures. A nice camera, the right moment and blind good luck. There have been enough successes to ignore the fact that most of what I shoot is all wrong (someone told me that for a single article in any issue of the National Geographic, 30,000 pictures are taken, so I have plenty of company), but one day, it got to the point where I simply could no longer bear not understanding what I was doing right.
How does my favorite picture of my son, age two, sitting in a friend’s lap, work? They are both perfectly in focus – you can see Jenny’s earring swaying – while the background is all blurred and soft. How did I get that effect? Why does this view from our rooftop terrace look so flat and boring while the same scene, shot from a different vantage point, looks evocative and mysterious? Why does the light falling at one angle cast a contemplative glow on the subject while at another it casts shadows so dark only the whites of the eyes show?
As so often happens in life, my need to know the answers to these puzzles coincided with the arrival of a teacher. Edmund Cluett, a Renaissance man if ever there was one, has been a volunteer in our organization, along with his wife, Angie, since July. Among his many gifts, Edmund is the most talented photographer I have ever met. With characteristic generosity, he offered to teach me as much as I was capable of learning. After a few false starts, in which I was intimidated to despair by the illogic of apertures (the bigger the number the smaller the hole? Hello?), he arrived at the perfect method for me (shoot in the morning, analyse in the evening) and my life began to change.
For the first time since I owned a camera, I have begun to take conscious photos. I am asking questions before I click the button: what am I taking a picture of? Why? Is there a mood I am trying to capture? Do I want the result to be casual and fun or studied and formal? What is the subject? How do I know?
I have learned about the “Rule of Thirds” and how beautifully a photograph can be composed with the subject off to one side and plenty of negative space beyond, about how having something in the foreground of a landscape adds complexity and interest to the scene and about leading the viewer into the photo through the choice and placement of the subject. And I finally understand the concept of depth of field!
I have also learned more about consciously looking at the photographs themselves, particularly the ones that don’t work. Analysing why one picture speaks to me and another doesn’t is as important an exercise as taking it in the first place.
One could, I suppose, make almost anything into a passion, but photography, by its very nature, cries out to become one. It is, first and foremost, about seeing. The camera, Edmund is fond of pointing out, is only a tool. It is the person who sees. My education in photography, then, has been in large part learning to look, to observe, to see the beauty in the common everyday miracles which make up each one of our lives.
My assignment for every day is to carry my camera on my walk to work and take at least twelve pictures on the way. It’s only a quarter of a mile – a short walk which used to take me about three minutes. Now that I am studying the route with open eyes, it takes much longer. The cracks in the wall, the shadows on a house, the flowering vine spilling over the gate, the rusted coils beneath a bicycle seat – all suddenly seem beautiful and worthy of consideration. My walk now has become an almost religious experience, and the connection I feel to the people and objects I photograph is peculiar and stirring. I feel, having seen them from many angles and noted their lines and shadows and the places where they grow and move, as if I belong to them, and they to me.
It is no coincidence that my teacher was once a Buddhist monk. Edmund lived in a monastery for fourteen years. His every single day was the same at one level – the same routine, the same duties, the same objects, the same clothes, the same food, the same colors and sights and sounds – and at another, full of variety and mystery and charm. His gift, and his art, is the ability to see and to be present, to witness the moment which presents itself and find the beauty it contains.
Edmund has spent many days at each of our centers, photographing the children with disabilities with whom we work. One of the parents at our Early Intervention Center, where most of the children have very significant handicaps including hydrocephaly, cerebral palsy and Downs, went through the pictures in wonder and said “None of them look as if they have any problem at all! How does he do that?” The camera is only a tool. The art is in the seeing. (You can visit Edmund and Angie’s website at www.angieandedmund.com to see for yourself!)
