General – Dietmar Tallroth

Space and Emptiness

In Art & Photography / General / Other artists / Technique / The Art of Seeing

Recently, I visited an exhibition in the Sinebrychoff Museum in Helsinki, showing under the title “Under the Cherry Blossom” a selection from the large collection of Japanese woodblock prints of Finlands national gallery Atheneum.

There, a series of Geisha pictures by Kitagawa Utamaro (1753 – 1806) caught my eye, not for the motive, but for the use of space. This question of use of space, however, is a central problem for visual artists that operate with fixed-dimensional canvasses (like painters and photographers). One has an empty square, either a canvass or the viewfinder in the camera, and a motif. The question then is, where the motive is placed. Utamaro shows us some of the (many) possibilities and, thanks to the liberal reproduction policy of the Atheneum, I can show them here:

First I noticed (almost painfully) the left leftmost picture. The hairdo indeed touches the frame. The placement of the face leans towards the left border and the hair and decoration form a diagonal from the top center to somewhere in the upper part of the left side. I wondered why I found this quite disturbing. Somehow, I think it leaves the figure “crowded” by the frame – the attention is drawn to the frame and the limits of the canvas. It looks to me, somehow, unnatural and unbalanced.

In the picture in the middle, the pose of the figure seems more settled (and the face almost centred) but now there is, I find, rather unsettling empty space on top and to the left of the figure. I’ll come back in a moment to the unsettling effect of emptiness, but here the figure (despite the dark big hair) seems to produce a center of visual gravity at the lower right corner – as if she was about to slide out from the picture.

The rightmost, third picture however is very different. All figures are slightly cut-off, the dark masses of hair are balanced in a triangle and the direction of the gaze of the standing figure reading a book seems also to fill the empty space to the left (where the inscription provides further balance). Paradoxically, to me, the very fact that the figures are cut-off reduces the presence of the frame. The brain is used to “auto-complete” incomplete extracts from reality, we know that these figures extend beyond the picture and it becomes easier to “feel” the space and room around them.

This role of the cut-off is quite significant for landscape scenes, where there is often a form of cut-off by necessity and always interesting to see how the artist chooses to cut off. But let’s return to the empty space. I said (claimed) that empty space can have an unsettling effect. Sometimes such an effect is the whole point of a picture. Think, e.g., of Kazimir Malevich’s famous Black Square from 1915 (I don’t have to show it here, it is just a uniformly black, square canvas). Malevich’s picture was meant to be hanged in a room instead, and at the place, of a Madonna icon. Black empty space there had its own, unsettling meaning.

There is, of course, a further famous example of a picture full of empty space and that is Muqi’s “Geese Alighting on a Sandbank” (now at the Idemitsu Museum in Tokyo).

In one of his video lectures, the late, great James Cahill tells the story how he, as a young researcher in Japan, came to see the work, while it was still in private ownership (in the 1950s). It was shown in the picture alcove, the tokonoma, to be gazed and meditated on. He kneeled in front of it but had, after about 20 seconds, the feeling that he had seen everything there was to see. Still, it would have been impolite to leave so early, so he continued uncomfortably to gaze at the work. Later, he continues, he used to send postcards of this painting, which he adorned with speech bubbles where one goose says “Quack!” and other other answers “Quiet! This is a Zen painting”. Maybe it was that Cahill as art historian was so used to finding details in pictures that an almost empty piece of paper disturbed him. (I do think, however, that compared to Malevich a lot is still going on in the Muqi painting.)

While Malevich uses his canvas as a kind of black hole in the context of a certain scene (a traditionally adorned room) and thus conveys meaning, also the emptiness of Muqi’s painting, I think, conveys meaning. That is, however, not a narrative-based meaning, one we can decipher and tell (we can still do that with Malevich), but a meaning that is accessible only through experiencing it by gazing at the picture. This means, Cahill’s unsettled reaction could be the whole point of the picture. A questioning of our expectation and perception of of reality.

Now I want to build a bridge to my previous post on narratives and meaning: there is another form to communicate meaning other than by narrative. If one can make another simply “see” or “feel” (i.e. experience) a meaning there is no need for words. A merely empty canvas, however, does rarely work (again: in the Malevich case the room actually creates the picture). Emptiness, I claim, is created from motifs placed into empty space. Negative space and positive space create each other. I think Utamaro’s Geisha’s demonstrate this quite well. At the same time, the very fact that space in visual art exists within a frame (the limit of the canvas) requires to solve the tension (or even contradiction) between this frame and the emptiness and motif within.

I notice that this is a topic over which I have started to almost obsess. So expect more half-empty canvasses from me also in the future…

Meaning

May 19, 2022 By Dietmar Tallroth With 0 Comment

In Art & Photography / Article / General / Lose thoughts

Two Modes of Narration

Recently, Kathleen Jamie wrote in The New Statesman :

“… But how can time break? Surely time goes on like an arrow, through one damn thing after the next.
Well, maybe it doesn’t. This extraordinary book will win devotees among that minority who don’t see “stories” everywhere, who resent the hegemony of narrative, and who perhaps experience time more like a spiral …”
(from the review of Hugh Raffles book “The Book of Unconformities : Speculations on Lost Time“

I found this deliciously well observed. This was the first time I read someone pointing out the deep connection between our sense of time and our fondness for narratives. Still, it is good to remember that things might not be so clear cut. A juxtaposition of linear and circular views of time is not necessarily sharp-edged. Asian cultures are known for an emphasis on circular movements in time. One of the most famous of such movements being the “wheel of reincarnation” in Buddhism. But even in these cultures the life of Buddha e.g. is told as a normal, linear-timeline-narrative. The difference, of course, is that the wheel of reincarnation is an idea about reality, while the life of Buddha is a historical narrative. But one can ask any farmer in the West as well: he will be quite able to manage circular (e.g. seasonal) timelines along with linear one’s. Finally, the horizon of any circle may look like a straight line (to our perception) if the circle is just large enough.

Still, I have been one of those complaining about the increasing hegemony of narrative (oh, so wonderfully put!) in the visual arts (and elsewhere). This, however, has to do mostly with an insight that there is not one mode of narration, but two. Let me explain: the first mode of narration is a tool of communication between humans. This mode seems to me very fundamental to human thinking and it is easy to imagine how it might have evolved: look!, tiger comes from the wood, looks to us, gets closer, will eat us, run!!! Later at the fire, this story of their escape might have been repeated to the others in the group. It is this mode of narration that led to the stories of world literature we all love.

From early on, there has been, however, a second mode of narration: stories that pretend to be perception, stories that construe meaning from what we observe. It is the use of that mode of narration that has been much overdone in my view, which I consider even dangerous and would like to call here (with all intended negativity) false narratives. Before we turn to these, though, we might have to look at what we (ehem, I) mean by meaning.

The Meaning Of Meaning

The term meaning is maybe best understood when looking at its (probably original) uses: with signs and symbols. There is nothing inherently stop-py in a red light but we all know that a red traffic light means that we should stop. The stoppiness of the red light might still have deep roots, though. A red, ripe apple makes one stop to eat, a green, unripe one makes one to move on. That red apples are ripe is an observation, while saying: “Mother Nature has painted these apples red for us so we know which one we can eat” is a narrative (and a classical example for a false one). Both, observations and narratives are ways in which our mind makes sense of what our senses sense (I am so full of puns today…) and both assume that, beyond the sensory input, there is a second level of insight – and that second level of insight is the important one. Not the red light, but the implied order by the state to stop is the decisive level of reality.

So far so good, if and when we are in fact dealing with signs and symbols as in the traffic light example. Not so good, in my not so humble view, in case of the red apple. The problem is that if we exchange observation with narrative, all we might end up with is a fantasy world – and never more as when we start to treat matters as narratives like in “the meaning of life” (Ah, now you start smelling where this is heading). Anyhow, it is time to go back to the false narratives now.

False Narratives

Our minds (mine, if you prefer) are filled to the rim with false narratives. Religions tell us that our life is part of a “bigger story”. Politicians, historians and philosophers tell us that there are nations, which might have “destinies”. Marketing tells us that this cream makes us younger, fitter, whateverisher. (And ah, I have written earlier a lot about false narratives regarding things and consumerism.) All of these have in common that they cloak narratives as observations. All of them construe a reality beyond our sensory input or interpret it on our behalf. Just recently we have seen where this can lead: that large parts of populations in certain countries indeed believe that red is green and green is red.

On a more innocent level, I have been working for some time on a (unpublished) project about “Stories in Nature” where I (ironically and) playfully superimposed false narratives on observations in nature. If you follow this blog, you might remember e.g. the “Little Icehog”.

But let us summarise at this point: 1) False narratives replace observations. 2) False narratives suggest that there is a second level of reality, not reached by observation but which can be reached by interpretation and thus unlocking meaning.

If that is so, what then do we mean by the meaning of life (or meaning in life) and why do quite a few psychologists suggest that there is a “Crisis of Meaning”, making people sick. Yep, now we get to the hairy questions.

The Meaning in Life

This is, of course, a topic we might not be able to attack head on. Let us first circle it a bit like a predator before the jump. As I explained, using the term meaning already implies that we don’t just live but that there is an inner, truer story about this simple fact in need of unlocking.

Did it ever occur to you that all questions around identity would be moot if we only would stop discriminating against each other? Yes, I think, what we see as identity and its suppression is based on a whole bunch of false narratives. If we wouldn’t construe narratives about identity, if it just wouldn’t matter at all if we are man or woman, white or black, straight or gay, left or right, what we believe in or not, if we just could be humans (and more so) there would be no need to identify with anything but ourselves. But that is, of course, not the world we live in (and still John Lennon was right: just imagine).

Equally, if we could stop treating life as a symbol or a timeline (you see we are back to the linearity of narratives!), indeed if we could stop treating life as a narrative in the first place, the question of its meaning, or how to life a meaningful life, would become far less urgent.

Reading obituaries is a clear sign of ageing; nevertheless I have started to read a few of them and noticed that almost all weave life as a narrative. (S)he went to school there and there, the parents were this and that, then came marriage, the right amount of children, a career, then retirement, membership in hobby clubs and then – the end. Is life no more than a CV? (Ok, that might be inherent in the genre of the obituary, but still.)

Isn’t life about the “lateral” events, those that go across the timeline of our ageing. The moments of tenderness, understanding, insight, learning? The hand on the shoulder of a friend in distress, the random act of kindness, the word of advice, watching leaves unfold in spring or experiencing the dance of cranes on the ice of a lake. Isn’t that what will survive us because it will continue to reverberate in others long after we died?

Now, I will make a bold statement: what we are looking for (in vain) in false narratives, in the search for meaning, we can find in the simple act of experience. Which leads us, obviously (…), to: the river.

The River

Also the river has been mightily abused by narratives: as it springs from its source to the happy end when it reaches the sea (and don’t we all love Smetana’s Vltava for that reason already?). The problem is only: we are left no wiser for what a river actually is.

What then, is a river. A river, first, is water. Water that interacts with land (as clouds are water interacting with the air). A river becomes sea, or clouds, or a lake, a drink in our glas and thus part of our body. We might see it as part of cycle (Caution! False narrative alarm!) but in the end it is just water – and water is everywhere, all the time, the same water. A river is water in movement, sometimes uproar, it is water showing its muscles its (and gravity’s) unrelenting force.

Since I stood up to the hip in rivers while fly fishing, the almost spiritual experience of the river’s force haunts me. I do not have to have more from the river than the memory of this experience. Since then it has become one of my obsessions (and a kind of yearly spring ritual) to photograph the river in its force.

I titled the picture “Across”. If you remember from a few paragraphs above, I wrote about: across the timeline. So, I admit, the title is absurd; it is a dadaist play with the absurd because I superimpose (half of) a narrative on the nameless. But my recommendation is: stop worrying about meaning. Visit the river.

Bending Perception

October 12, 2021 By Dietmar Tallroth With 0 Comment

In Art & Photography / Article / General

2021-07-20-Evo-0096

Perception is a curious phenomenon. Our mind continuously extracts patterns from our sensory input and processes them in strange ways.

Let’s take an example: we have a stroll through a tropical forest and suddenly we sense a movement. Our brain immediately starts working: ‘Teeth’, ‘Stripes’, ‘Tiger’, ‘ Run!!!’. Besides the identification of a large cat (tiger), we might also identify aggression (bared fangs, movement towards us).

It seems obvious from my example, how evolutionary useful this pattern recognition is and how it thus might evolve through natural selection. We can also assume, that many animals as part of their instinctive behaviour might posses the ability to recognise such patterns.

Philosophy has forever struggled with the phenomenon. One especially puzzling question was how our thinking about objects (patterns) is related to reality. For Plato, there were ideal forms (like the idea of a tiger) that we recognised in an concrete entity, that is the concrete animal. Aristotle thought that real things belong to categories of being that are reflected in our mind. Kant finally told us that such categories are just ways how our mind works and we don’t know anything about the real objects beyond that.

There is of course a first question, whether the concept of a tiger exists in our mind even without language or whether mental concepts and language are linked. If we consider that our thinking mostly happens through an inner monologue and our earliest memories typically date back to the time we acquired language, some link seems likely.

Experiments have also shown that mental associations differ, depending on the language, in particular the genus of a noun in the mother language of a test subject: Germans and Spaniards tend to associate different adjectives with nouns that have a different genus in these languages (the word for bridge, e.g. is feminine in German and masculine in Spanish). That of course leaves the question open for e.g. English or Finnish speakers. My point is: language seems to at least influence how we think about objects and the world.

Clearly, however, also visual recognition plays a role besides language. When in the German Bauhaus archetypal forms for use in universally recognisable signs were investigated, there were indicators that certain visual elements were necessary, e.g. to evoke the picture of a tree. Even here, though, there might be cultural differences and the archetype of a tree in Central Europe might more resemble an oak with thick stem and broad crown, while in the Northern Countries the tree archetype might have a more slender form. Still, if a shape contains a stem and branches, and maybe some leaves, it might be universally recognised as a tree.

This pattern recognition is, however, notoriously error prone because it seems optimised for speed (see the tiger example why this might be useful) rather than correctness. Daniel Kahneman’s book Thinking, Fast and Slow explains this in greater detail. But there are other pitfalls. One of them is expressed in the Sorites Paradox. This goes back to an obscure Greek philosopher (sorites is the word for “heap” in Old Greek) and asks: “If one has a heap of sand, how many grains of sand can be removed before the heap ceases to be a heap?”

If one removes one grain from a heap of a million grains of sand, the rest certainly still qualifies as a heap. But if all the grains except one are removed; does this single grain still qualify as heap? Probably not; but where goes the borderline?

There have been an astounding amount of solutions proposed to this problem (Wikipedia is your friend, if you are interested). Lawyers, of course, solve this through a normative approach: one second before the 18th birthday one is underage (in certain countries) and one second later empowered with full legal capacity, but a person hardly matures in that second. Such line drawing is eminently useful but doesn’t tell us about the underlying reality.

Languages (and maybe even our thinking) tend to treat certain patterns as distinct even if they aren’t (like the heap). Let’s look at another example:

Above, you see the visible electromagnetic spectrum of light, that means the wavelengths of light our eyes can see. Where exactly would you place blue, green, yellow, red in that picture?

In artificial intelligence, the problem has been approached by so-called fuzzy logic that leaves the world of distinct terms and introduces gradations. A pile of sand grains thus would increase in “heapishness” and our spectrum would have gradations and areas of “blueness” and so on.

Still the fundamental problem remains: the very mechanisms evolved to secure survival hinder our correct understanding of the world. This has significant practical implications. Certain diseases might be better treated if we look at our bodies not as entities but as ecosystems of microbiomes. The more we learn about nature, the more distinctions disappear and are replaced by gradations and interconnectedness. Where e.g. do the “hosts” end and the “symbiotes” begin or are they better understood as ecosystems as well? Every single cell in our body (or in a plant) goes back to three different bacterial ancestors that partially still reproduce independently. A significant part of our body weight is made up from the symbiotic and opportunistic microbiome in our gut. Are we rather lumps of bacteria or “distinct” entities?

Not for the first time regarding this blog you might have asked yourself what this has to do with photography. Well, photography has prided itself with the degree of “realism” it provides. But all it seems to do is to trigger pattern matching mechanisms. If I make a photo of a tree, all a viewer might notice is that “a tree is a tree, is a tree, is a tree”. But a tree, I think, cannot be understood without the winds shaping it, the precipitation and light enabling or hindering its growth, its symbionts like the mycelium or the other animals and plants it interacts with. In portraits of persons, photographers try to capture hints to the inner life of a person; is this possible for a tree?

And how in a photograph can gradations be captured, be shown that a landscape morphs from one state to another, is like a living thing? The photographer, I think, has to constantly stay aware that s(he) is struggling against the strong forces of pattern recognition and categorisation at work in our minds. Deeper insights will always, it seems, require the photographer to bend the perception of the viewer, to make the seemingly certain look uncertain. Oh my.

Signal

April 13, 2021 By Dietmar Tallroth With 0 Comment

In Art & Photography / Article / General

2021-03-31-Nukarinkoski-0028

Recently, I re-read Greg Milner’s book “Perfecting Sound Forever” (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2010). The book tells the history of audio recording from the days of Edison’s drum-recorders to the digital age. Again, I found the text eminently readable and interesting. What struck me most this time, though, were the similarities to the history of photography. Let me expand on that.

With every technological advancement in audio recording, the inventors claimed the result to be more life-like, or having higher fidelity, than the previous method. Already Edison, for example, claimed that a live performance and his recordings were indistinguishable (having still being exposed to 78 rpm shellac disks, I find this claim quite astonishing, given the crackles and hisses I remember). Since the 1950s and the invention of stereo recording, the term HiFi (for high fidelity) has been used for a whole range of technologies from record players to digital audio players. All the technological advancements since Edison have, however, one thing in common: each created its own backlash in form of a community of detractors. Such detractors (who at some time started to call themselves “audiophiles”) claimed that some very essential aspect of sound or music was lost in new technologies. And thus we see recurring renaissances of the vinyl record, which otherwise has been superseded on the market place by first the CD and then digital audio files (like MP3).

Likewise, quite a few claim that essential elements in photography have been lost in the path from wet plates (and large cameras with bellows) to film and, finally, digital photography. The newest development of computational photography will for sure have the same effect and, correspondingly, “alternative” ways of photographing (i.e. using old technologies) are used widely, especially in art circles.

This all seemed to me quite curious and I wondered what is happening here. If someone claims fidelity of anything, as critically inclined, enlightened individuals we of course should ask: fidelity to what? What are these technologies supposed to record and what is the, let say, essence of music or, in case of photography, the subject? And this is where we then soon get into trouble because concepts get so elusive. Traditionally, music was always performed in rooms and the acoustic properties of the room were part of the sound. But there were also coughing, rustling and other noises coming from the audience (or think of Glen Goulds humming and moaning performances). Still, I think the audio engineers didn’t try to achieve fidelity by including these side noises of a performance – and in the digital age they even excluded the performance room as a parameter. Famously, Ansel Adams lugged extremely large and heavy cameras up slippery mountain slopes to detect that the best photo of Half Dome in Yellowstone Park was made when using a modifying red filter on the lens – a clear act against fidelity.

When reading Milner’s book it becomes clear that an underlying theme is that engineers tried to optimise an acoustic (or visual) signal, while the sceptics perceived a diminished experience. Underlying this strange phenomenon is maybe a misconception. Some seem to believe that we hear and see with our ears and eyes only, thus a stronger or clearer signal alone leads to a better experience. I think, however, it is more correct to say that we hear and see with our brains, which will distinguish patterns, extract or inject meaning, and intermingle the signal with emotions, memories and other mental and chemical functions. In this the sceptics might be right: experience doesn’t necessarily equal signal fidelity.

Still, I was quite struck when I first (in the early 1980s) heard a CD recording of Dire Straits’s “Sultans of Swing” in a record shop in my home town. From then on, I converted my music collection to CD and never looked back to the crackling and hissing of vinyl records. I also admit that I rather listen to music in my own place and find especially live (authentic?) rock concerts unbearable for their loudness.

I also can appreciate the advantages of film photography and the gentle roll-off of highlights in film. In addition, I would immediately agree that photography should be something tangible and not only an image on a screen. That is why I still devote so much time and effort to the art of printing. But some of the negative consequences of new technologies, like the loudness wars in audio recording, which started in the 1990s to make radio stations pop from car speakers, and the proliferation of garishly over-coloured and -manipulated imagery one can observe on the internet are just that: excesses. They will, I believe, disappear or turn into more creative, human expressions of meaning. Of course, as Milner’s book also shows, every time technology evolves, our tastes (and the new “normal”) do as well and the very meaning of the word “Music” is different today than during Edison’s times.

Ultimately, Milner’s book served for me as a reminder that photography is not about sharper pictures or “cleaner” signals. Too clean and polished, on the contrary, can be pointless, tiring and unsustainable in the long term, if it is not infused with meaning and an emotional connection to the very plight of being human in a real world. But to infuse pictures with meaning, whether emotional or intellectual, is the task of the photographer and relatively independent of technology.

A long time ago I wrote here about sea shells and stories. In the picture on the top, the same happened: once I saw the little ice hedgehog on its rock looking out on the flood, I couldn’t “un-see” it anymore. The story, the pattern, the possible meanings took on a life of their own. While I maintain that we should not see everything through the human lens because if we do so, we miss the true stories the trees, rocks, clouds and nature in general have to tell and we easily misinterpret our role in all of this, I do recognise that everything we do in art in the end should still feel organic, humane and touching.

The photographer is not (and has never) just recorded a signal; photographing is like making music, not like recording it (to borrow again from Ansel Adams). Meaning is an elusive concept and can only be transmitted from human to human by effort and often circumventing our “normal” ways of perception and by stimulating our inquisitiveness and emotions.

P.S.: Just as I finished this article, I came over a TED talk by British designer Richard Seymour, where he stresses that beauty is an emotion, not a thought. How he does that is quite brilliant and I can highly recommend to take the 15min to watch this – it seems to me quite related to what I wrote here.

Rivers and Waves

September 22, 2020 By Dietmar Tallroth With 0 Comment

In General / Lose thoughts / On Location / Seasons

2019-09-03-Teno-0043

Recently I visited the valleys of two of the northernmost rivers in Finland: Utsjoki and Teno. As on previous occasions, I became enchanted by majestic beauty of these lesser known and definitely remote landscapes.

Nature rarely does straight, but in these valleys everything is curved: the wide rivers, their sand banks and the surrounding, softly rounded mountains that continue layer after layer into seeming endlessness. Ones view can get lost in these rolling shapes and only the constantly changing light checkers and structures the landscape. A mountain that one moment was looming dark above, suddenly catches light and starts to glow in autumn colours of yellow and red only to fade again into grey a few moments later.

2019-09-03-Teno-0061

I don’t know, why there my soul starts to softly tremble. True enough, I was born among the hills and on the banks of a river. But, maybe, there is an even deeper connection here. Haven’t in pre-historic times humans colonised Central Europe through its river valleys and settled among the hills surrounding the Danube river? Maybe there is something about such landscapes that promises a home to humans. A place to fish and hunt, a place that gives shelter from cold winds and provides drinking water throughout the year.

2020-09-16-Inari-Teno-0070

Whatever the reasons might be. The weary soul finds rest there on the bank of the river with its endless sound of time. Looking out from an elevated point I often thought that the mountains look like waves on an ocean which in the shifting light appear and disappear and seem strangely alive. It is in these moments I deeply understand how the crust of the earth is a living and moveable thing and that in nature all formation is unified and alike in a certain rhythm.

2020-09-16-Inari-Teno-0065

And can one not compare our lives to waves? Waves that raise in our youth to softly ebb away in age. And whatever small eddies, currents, distractions and hindrances there might be: allowed its natural course the wave will forcefully roll through time and then slowly ebb away to again merge with the ocean of human hope, aspiration and longing for meaning. How fleeting, how fragile, how ephemeral our lives appear in light of these seemingly eternal mountains. And still, both are part of an endless flow and I cannot help but marvel at these wonders. In the back of my mind a tiny voice tells me that maybe, just maybe all this longing for meaning is meaningless and what I am supposed to do is to just let my heart flow among the mountains and the river. And thus the soul catches a ray of light and starts to glow.

The Ethics of Balance III

April 8, 2020 By Dietmar Tallroth With 0 Comment

In Art & Photography / Article / General / Lose thoughts

All human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights.

Article 1, Universal Declaration of Human Rights, December 10, 1948

Human dignity is inviolable.

Article 1 (1), Basic Law of the Federal Republic of Germany

In the second part of this post, I speculated about the need to search for a new ethics of balance, an ethics where we are not anymore the one and only ends of ethical concern.

If we then approach this strange and exotic world created by an ethics of balance, what has changed? One thing that hasn’t changed is the “human condition”. None of us has been asked before we were born. As Sartre formulated, we are all “thrown into existence”. At the same time, we all have been programmed by evolution with a hunger for survival – and an even deeper and mysterious yearning for meaning.

These basic parameters of the human experience are the foundations for the assumption of dignity, that is worthiness in its own right, regarding all human existence. This dignity is both tragic (because we are exposed to our biological existence without reprieve) and hopeful (because we can transcend our existence through wisdom, love and beauty). But most of all, we are all in the same boat.

What now, if under an ethics of balance, we assume that the boat is much bigger than we thought and we’re in it together with all living things (or like Naess would say just about everything else)? What if animals and plants, who share the same tragic of existence also would have dignity? Do they also in some way share the yearning for meaning? We don’t know – but we do know, that many of our long hold assumptions about other living things weren’t quite right. Who’d have thought that rats can be compassionate and refuse acts that would harm other rats? What I am trying to say is that our still persisting ignorance regarding many aspects of non-human existence should not lead us to arrogance in assuming only we have value and dignity.

In 2008, the Swiss Federal Ethics Committee on Non-Human Biotechnology (ECNH) produced a most remarkable document titled “The dignity of living beings with regard to plants”, which I warmly recommend for reading as it addresses quite a few of the topics I mentioned here. There are many astonishing findings there, like the one that we aren’t quite sure anymore that plants aren’t sentient. It also concludes, among other things, that arbitrary harm to plants is unethical. In its foreword, the paper mentions an objection to the effort of the committee based on that “human life would become morally too demanding and too complicated if this area of human action had also to be justified”.

But hasn’t that always been the case in ethics? For sure, assuming dignity in slaves, people of colour, women, the poor, those with disabilities and those with differing sexual orientation has been “a moral complication” for those in majority and power. Ethics are often a damn nuisance for those in charge. This is a reason why we still struggle with the concept of universal protection of human dignity to this day. But this is also why I call ethics as a tool to position oneself. Who do we want to be? Do we only accept the tragic part of our existence or do we also embrace the hopefulness of our potential? And there comes a, I feel much neglected, point that we can’t become better humans if we not also consider the non-human sphere, if we don’t become better citizens of the earth. When, however, we do assume dignity in all living or even non-living things, do we have to stop eating, wearing clothes, building houses and tools, or even fight against diseases? I don’t think so. I don’t think a lion is “wrong” in hunting prey – and we are predators likewise and haven’t chosen to be so. What we would need, though, is a whole new level of consideration and justification for what, why and how we do things. We would have to balance our needs with those of all other living things, like we have to balance in ethics and law our own rights against those of other human beings.

Let me take up then a last point on this: Dignity as presented here is an individual concept, it applies to individual entities. But there is the aspect to reality that all is connected and interchanging. The water in our drinking glass might once reappear in a cloud. We not only “burn” food but use it also to build the very cells of our body. And when we die, our body not only nourishes other things but also our thoughts and interactions continue to live on in those we interacted with. We are at the same time distinguishable waves and still part of the ocean. And as A.N. Whitehead once wrote, even mountains are just waves in the right time perspective. This means we are not only, as I wrote above, in the same boat with everything else but everything is just a single ocean. There have been many names for this insight during the centuries of human thought. For myself I prefer to call it the unity of reality because unity is also a concept in aesthetic theory and thus helps me to think of it in terms of visual concepts. And there is the first hint then to why I write about this in a photography blog.

There is no picture without a point of view. And that is not necessarily a physical point but one that is rooted in an aesthetic framework, the ethical position and an ontological assumption (that is an assumption about the nature of reality) of the artist.

Let me give an example: photojournalists are often driven by concerns regarding human dignity and by showing “what really is happening” (vs official propaganda) for example in reporting about war zones. How they depict this is always dependent on the aesthetic framework they have chosen, like Henri Cartier-Bresson did with strong geometry.

So what I am trying to do here in this series is to explain where I come from, not what you should do. This is a manifesto, not a teaching. Art is also always a hunt rather than a statement. The war photographer not only postulates human dignity she also searches for it in the circles of hell.

Before I end this part of the series, I have to address, however, one last related point (oh yes, I know this is already far too long…). A friend recently asked me regarding the “abstractions” I mention in my last book and whether I think they are real or just a construct of the human mind. This is a very good (and old) question. Are we making abstractions like dignity, beauty, ethics or unity just up, are they language artefacts or artefacts of our way to think? We can’t really tell, says Kant, they are at least realities of our mind. Others say that everything is anyhow just a huge illusion. Some things, quantum mechanics says, happen only when we observe. How can we decide, which is right? We have no tool to observe anything from outside our mind (which was precisely Kant’s point). The laws of physics, for example, are abstractions. They assume a ball rolling down a hill always behaves in a calculable way not only in the concrete instance we observe. Are then the laws of physics “real”, that means attributes of reality, or just superpositions on reality by our mind. No one can say with absolute certainty. We are just sufficiently convinced they are real because of a shared experience based on the ability to make predictions. We thus reduce the possibility of delusion without being able to completely eliminate it.

There remains an element of conviction and belief no matter how rationally we proceed. This even applies to other abstractions in science. Astrophysics currently struggles mightily with this topic with regard to theories (like the multiverse) that can neither be proven nor disproven by experiment and prediction. We just have to be infinitely more careful in postulating shared experiences or abstractions without predictability because there is always the possibility of a shared delusion.

During the years I have been photographing and observing, I have developed a growing suspicion, maybe even conviction, that the concept of beauty is not just in the eye of the beholder, an evolutionary artefact or simply wishful thinking. I meanwhile think it is a true attribute or aspect of reality itself. There is no method to prove this. What art, however, can do is to create shared experiences (where possibly a viewer comes to similar conclusions as the artist) – and then see whether these experiences stand the test of time. Only so can art validate itself and its underlying assumptions. Which now, finally, makes a nice bridge to the last part of this series. Stay tuned for part IV…

The Ethics of Balance II

April 3, 2020 By Dietmar Tallroth With 0 Comment

In Art & Photography / General

2019-09-05-Pallas-Ylläs-0031_DxO

In our world of instantaneous communication it seems that not the inconvenient truths but the convenient untruths are the bigger problem. During the current pandemic it is easy to forget that viruses are not mankind’s only problem. Like climate change, though, the pandemic is rather a symptom than the cause for the quagmire into which mankind has led itself. Poorer folk knew this already: lack of access to water or arable land, housing, sanitation or food have been reality for many for a long time. Deforestation and other unsustainable forms of exploitation of natural resources as well as the destruction of habitats and eco-diversity are enormous problems even without climate change.

The even relatively modest rise in average wealth of the Chinese population during the last two decades shows what an explosion in resource use and pollution results from attempting to free the world population from the scourges of poverty and need. If our planet is at all able to feed a growing world population, it is more than questionable that it could do so at levels we are used to in industrialised nations. Still, within these industrialised nations we complain that too few children are born in fear for our pension systems.

Confronted with such problems, however, counteraction seems not to be the prevailing response. Whenever a new issue arises, people can almost instantly pick and choose from a whole marketplace of opinions offering them either convenient denial, consolation or distraction through more consuming or entertainment. It seems that even rage and hatred are served as twisted ways of distraction and a terrible form of entertainment. All of these offerings have in common to provide psychological escape routes from an insight. The insight that extinction is a real possibility for the future of mankind.

Even those, however, who basically accept that something has to be done, are often baffled on what we realistically can do. Change at a scale necessary to ensure mankind’s survival (and general prosperity) seems almost impossible. There are those, who favour even bolder steps forward, to use technology even more intensively. Hawking’s idea that humankind has to flee into space falls into this category. But technologies are not produced from nothing. They always include even more intense use of this planet’s resources, even if single devices or technologies use more renewable resources and are getting more effective. Others therefore say we have to de-grow, de-industrialise and de-urbanise in order to curb our use of natural resources. In its most radical form this means to more or less undo the industrial revolution.

What, therefore, should we do? If you ask me, I honestly don’t know. I am, however, neither convinced that more “clever” use of technology nor the mere “green-painting” of bad habits will help. I fully realise, how difficult change already individually is (not least for myself). Even there, on a mere personal level, strong motivators are needed to provoke any change.

Besides our basic drives, maybe surprisingly, our ethics is such a motivator. I believe it to be very difficult, if not impossible, for humans to persistently and over a long period of time to live in conflict with their own ethical and value system. They will either adapt their ethical system and glide into psychopathy (the way, one or the other dictator did) or they will adapt their behaviour in a way to be justifiable under their ethical norms. Even bad people want to believe they are good people. Ethics, actually, matter. Our internal ethical system colours everything we do, what ideas we have and what solutions we choose.

In the Western tradition, systems of ethics are all directed to the wellbeing of humans, only. This is because we humans have seen us on top of a value chain. The so-called Cultural Mandate expressed in Genesis 1:28 (man’s mandate to subdue the natural world) exemplifies this. There is a strong underlying notion that because of our sentience we are different (and somehow more worthy) than everything else in the universe. It is in this spirit that Hawking suggests we grab another planet if this one gives up. The same idea underlies also the often heard saying that we have to preserve Earth for “future generations” (of humans, not frogs, mind you).

This view is so pervasive that it is easily forgotten that many peoples and cultures had quite a different understanding of our place in the universe. In these cultures, Man is rather seen as a citizen, not the master of the natural world. But also in the West like-minded notions have been growing.

From time to time, I have mentioned here the Norwegian philosopher Arne Naess. He is generally credited with creation of the “deep ecology movement”. But what does “deep” mean here? Deep, according to Naess, means driven by our core premises not by utility. This needs unfolding: Naess rejects solutions that make our behaviour just more sustainable, or one could say merely more compatible with nature. He thinks that any solution has to come from a different ethical core that gives up on the idea of the Cultural Mandate. In his gentle and polite ways Naess told us that we are quite delusional with regard to our importance and that everything around us is of equal value. Everything is an end to itself and nothing is merely means.

What then is right, the anthropocentric view of the Cultural Mandate or Naess’ ecocentric view (to give these views their proper names)? There might not be any objective method to decide this. Still, the history of science is also a history of findings that make us less unique or special than we liked to believe. Nature seems to consist of an awful lot of balancing cycles, which also apply to us. Such cycles are for example the population strength of predator and prey or control of population density by disease. And no, the epic battle there is not between us and the coronavirus and other disease agents. It is between the bacteria and phage-viruses that prey on them. And estimates say that there are more bacteriophage-viruses than every other organism on Earth, including bacteria, combined…

What I am trying to say here is that we act just like an arrogant upstart species, not like “masters” – otherwise we wouldn’t have to face the possibility of our own extinction caused by our own actions. Every victory we claim just seems to evoke a stronger counter-balancing act by nature. Through antibiotics there came multiple-resistant bacteria. Our heating up the planet comes back to us in waves and storms. It just seems to me that “masters” would have managed not to poison their own food.

What then if we would stop thinking of ourselves as masters and instead re-invent ourselves as benign, maybe even enlightened, citizen of the natural world? We would suddenly look out on a quite different reality, a strange place indeed, where balance and diversity play a major role.

But, this is for the next part of this post – and, eventually, I still intend to at some time even explain what in the world all of this has to do with art and photography.

The Ethics of Balance I

March 18, 2020 By Dietmar Tallroth With 0 Comment

In Art & Photography / Article / General

2020-03-13-Boet1-0011 1 — Notebook with Sticky Notes, Study, 2020 (c) Dietmar Tallroth

“In a world that is in chaos politically, socially and environmentally, how can the human race sustain another 100 years?”
Stephen Hawking

The above question, which Hawking posted on the internet in 2006 because he thought he didn’t know the answer, is one that is now, 14 years later, just as topical as it was then.

Hawking also later, in 2011, declared that “philosophy is dead”, because science would answer all questions and philosophers had not kept up with the relevant insights in science. This is, in my view, kind of funny because his question in 2006 showed, just how much philosophy is needed and maybe more than ever.

Kant had once postulated three questions of philosophy: What can we know? What should we do? What can we hope for? These questions are as valid as ever. And while philosophers might at times have been overrun by the speed of science regarding the first question, science does not answer questions two and three at all. Complete understanding of how a car works doesn’t make a responsible driver. And why should someone be a responsible driver and not just try to get to the destination as quickly as possible? And what do we hope for when we ask for responsible driving? (Less traffic victims, anyone?).

Hawking’s own hunch regarding the answer to his “100-years-question” was that mankind probably should intensify its space programs so it could flee if Earth was destroyed. For a long time this was an answer I could embrace. Now, I am not so sure anymore. Apart from the obvious practical difficulties: would it be really responsible to unleash us on the larger universe? Wouldn’t we just carry our sins as baggage and go on and destroy the next planet?

At this point it might be good to stress that this is still an art blog and not the place to solve all questions of mankind. On the other hand, as I tried to show in the last post, art always has tried to express general sentiments and ideas. Art can also be viewed as an effort by many artists during a given period of history to find adequate forms of expression to certain ideas. Right now, when I go to exhibitions of contemporary art, it strikes me that many others (also) seem to work based on the insight that our collective lives have to and will change significantly. But there are of course many ways to work around these topics and some seem more adequate than others.

Let me give you an (made-up) example: let’s say an artist expresses his or her disdain over the pollution of the oceans by piling a heap of plastic waste in the corner of a museum. Maybe with a dead turtle on top to further extend the sensorial impact of the work to extend to the olfactory realm.

While I don’t think that art always has to be beautiful, I still would think of such a work as rather obvious and crude, more belonging into the category of activism and maybe journalism than that of art. Without trying here futile definitions on what art is, I do think we are on a dead-end street if just every form of expression is declared art. That is what I mean by the quest for the adequate form of expression.

This is no different in speech. We still quote Mark Twain, Einstein and Churchill because they were able to express better, more concisely, poignantly and more artfully new ideas or simply what everyone else was thinking vaguely, too. And that is what art in the best case can do: create clarity where there was confusion. This greater clarity often sparks joy and helps us viewers to think and experience in a deeper way; it opens new pathways in our thinking and feeling. It inspires us.

Recently I have been studying Piet Mondrian and his transformation from a naturalistic painter to an icon of modernism between the years 1907 to 1921. Influenced by Theosophy, Mondrian was on a quest to distill the seeming randomness in nature down to a “pure reality”, which he called “Spirit”. The result we see in works like this:

Piet_Mondriaan,_1930_-_Mondrian_Composition_II_in_Red,_Blue,_and_Yellow — *Composition II in Red, Blue, and Yellow*, 1930, Kunsthaus Zürich

Mondrian restricts himself here to only primary colors (red, yellow and blue), primary tones (black, white and gray) and primary forms (rectangles and lines). At the same time he implies a larger context and creates both balance and a certain liveliness. While the “Spirit” or pure reality Mondrian seeks seems to me closer to platonic ideas than the “Nothingness” in Zen, the method of implication is at the heart of what Zen painters in China and Japan did.

If you are still unsure what I mean with implication, I suggest a search for “Mondrian Lozenge” and have a look at e.g. the “Lozenge with Two Lines” where indeed the two lines alone (if you’d think the canvas away) would imply the lozenge (the rectangle standing on a corner).

Implication is for me one of the great mysteries in art and so is balance. By now you might have noticed, however, that I didn’t mention here the ethics of balance but jumped from going to space to the work of Mondrian. I just can ask you to indulge me as what I have to say may unfold in the second part of this post… See you then!

Spirit and Form

February 25, 2020 By Dietmar Tallroth With 0 Comment

In Art & Photography / General / Lose thoughts

Bodhidharma, 2020

Life is sometimes strange. I had planned for another blogpost when I came over one of the fabulous video lectures by the late art historian James Cahill. There he made a remark that triggered a kind of avalanche of thoughts and so I started on this post. Finally, I noticed that this text might actually serve as a sort of preface to the one I originally wanted to write. And so be it.

Well, anyhow, Cahill said in that lecture that ideologies, philosophies and religions do not create artistic styles. Artists do. These are wise words. Even great ideas need actors. And these actors shape and develop the expression of great ideas. In the case of art, actors are the artists and their audience. The latter is quite important as during many periods of art history they commissioned works and paid to have certain expectations fullfilled. Artists didn’t always just express themselves. The self-contained artist is a recent phenomenon – if (s)he then exists at all. All of this, I think, is true.

And still.

At least the question remains, why certain artists and audiences considered certain styles as adequate expressions for certain ideas. In addition, there is the question why certain forms of expression seem so succesful that they become paradigms of their underlying ideas. I suspect that this happens when an expression aligns with the “feel” of an idea and not only its rational content.

But before I get too theoretical on you, let me give an example (or actually: two).

The dead Christ and three mourners.*tempera on canvas.*68 × 81 cm .*1470-1474

Andrea Mantegna: Lamentation of Christ, c. 1480

Liang Kai: Huineng cutting bamboo, c. 1205

These two paintings belong to the group of “influential” pictures in art history, which means they were style-forming and excerted stylistic influence on later artists and works. Mantegna you might realize is at the beginning of the Renaissance. But it might surprise you that there is a line of inheritance leading from the Liang Kai painting to Japanese design, to the Bauhaus and all the way to the design of the iPhone.

These two pictures have also a couple of things in common. Both constitute religious art (and I’ll explain that in a second). Both also were quite radical new forms of expression for their times. That they seem so familar only speaks for the power they excerted over later artists. Technically, both were quite innovative. Mantegna’s painting is one of the earliest examples of the use of foreshortening perspective in Western Art. Liang Kai’s picture is the first (known) to use “abbreviated brush strokes” (or sketch style, “Xie Yi”) that became a staple in the art of Zen Buddhism.

We in the West are familiar with the religious content of Mantegna’s painting but Liang Kai’s subject needs explaining. In his painting, Liang Kai depicts the (anecdotal) moment of enlightenment of the Sixth Zen Patriarch (the spiritual leader of the sect) Huineng while cutting bamboo. Huineng, however, was a rather obscure figure, which rose to prominence only some two hundred years after his dead in order to proof the spiritual legitimacy of the Southern School of Zen. This was a pivotal point for Zen as it then almost ceased to be a Buddhist sect and became a teaching all of its own. Huineng remains until today one of the most revered figures in Zen.

Montegna’s painting also marks a pivotal point: the birth of Humanism in the Renaissance. We see here for the first time the celebration of the human form (and implicitly the human spirit and potential) that became so familar to us through later works like those of Michelangelo or Leonardo da Vinci. Humanism today is, in the English speaking world, often associated with an anti-religous stance. And while that was not part of the original program of the Renaissance, it was one of its (unitended) consequences as the ideas of “Man” and “God” started to merge.

Both pictures thus actually mark points of departure from the strictures of organized religion up to that point. And I don’t think I am going too far in suggesting that in both cases people set about to redefine their place in the universe.

Religions can be grouped very crudely into certain categories. A common starting point for Buddhism and Christianity is that something is wrong with humankind. Adam and Eve eat from the tree of knowledge (!) and thereafter are in need of redemption. In Buddhism our mind serves us constantly illusions about reality and it is these illusions we have to be redeemed from. Human sentience, our perceived otherness from the rest of nature, seems in both cases the problem and one kind of understands how we sentient apes crawling down from the trees and looking around got the idea…

But, just for perspective, there are of course religions with a radically different outlook. In Shinto (or many other so-called animistic religions), for example, nothing is wrong with humankind. Instead we are just part of an interconnected world of spirits. Religion there is about our “social relations” with the rest of the natural world. The emphasis thus is on keeping a balance between all the interacting forces in nature, including Man.

Humanism’s answer to the question (or the otherness) of sentience was: more of it. The “divine spark” (did I mention Michelangelo already?) was to be fully developed. This, in the end, led us to modern science. Redemption did not mean going back beyond Adam and Eve but going forward to become god-like ourselves.

The Southern School of Zen Buddhism (attributed to Huineng) recognized “Buddha-nature” (the state of enlightenment) as not only a human opportunity but as the true inner state of everything. Our redemption just meant to wipe away the delusions in our minds. This didn’t require prayers or certain practices; in the right mind-set it could happen anytime, anywhere e.g. while cutting bamboo. Buddhist Sutras (teachings) were no help, only distractions. In another painting of Liang Kai, Huineng tears a sutra apart. The result would be the Non-Ego (because our personality had been an illusion), a state that Buddhists (confusingly for Westerners) call Nothingness but is more like an ultimate re-unfication of Man with reality.

Thus, while the starting points for the Southern School and Humanism had similarities, the aims and goals where basically opposites. I think the two paintings express these views splendidly. The Lamentation of Christ looks to me like humankind triumphant, beautiful even in death. The death of Christ seems to be not only an act of redemption. It looks like a start on the way to perfection, an aspiration and a re-confirmation of the divine spark.

In the Liang Kai picture there seems less of everything. Individuality merges into pure energies and lines. Contemporary Chinese thought everything in this picture was “wrong”, especially the brush work. But, just as a practice, try to figure out where the weight of the Huineng figure is in Liang Kai’s painting and how “weight” overall is suggested in the painting. If the underlying idea is that reality is empty and form is an illusion then this idea has found a perfect expression in the picture. And, indeed, from then on, what we call “Zen-painting” has been more concerned with balances between spaces, the “weight” of empty space and relations between object masses than with any concrete subject matter. No wonder this led to the first “abstract” paintings and was so inspiring for modernism in art.

In our time, I think, humankind again has started to (and has to) re-think its place in the universe anew. We are in need of new ideas and ways to communicate these ideas. What then is the adequate form of expression in our time?

While this post is already far too long, I owe you an explanation for the title of the picture at the top. Bodhidharma was the First Patriarch of Zen, a man from India who brought Zen to China. According to legend, Bodhidharma tried in vain to convince the Emperor of China of his teachings. Having failed, he retreated to a cave where he silently meditated facing a rock wall for the next nine years. In his conversation with the Emperor, Bodhidharma was asked “What is the highest meaning of the noble truth?”. Bodhidharma said “There is no noble truth, only emptiness.” The emperor then asked “Then, who is standing before me?” and Bodhidharma answered “I know not”.

I don’t know about you, but I sympathise with the answer “I know not” to the question on who we are. Maybe, we should head for the rock face, just saying.

Gentleness

October 17, 2019 By Dietmar Tallroth With 0 Comment

In A Tale of Five Painters / Art & Photography / General / Other artists

Sparrows on Bamboo in the Rain,
13th Century, China, attributed to Muqi
Nezu Museum, Tokyo

Recently, I visited an exhibition about so-called Bird-and-Flower Painting in China and Japan at the Nezu Museum in Tokyo.

The museum, by the way, is at any time worth a visit. Not only are its collections superb, its very modern architecture has still some resemblance to a traditional Japanese house–and its gardens are just lovely.

Muqi, about whom I have written many times, has exerted a strong influence on the development of Japanese monochrome ink painting and the exhibition showed many splendid examples for this. Of Muqi himself there was only one scroll on display: “Sparrows on Bamboo in the Rain”. The work is not signed so authorship is uncertain, but–for what it’s worth–to me it is entirely credible that this is a work of Muqi.

As you can see above, the scroll depicts a lovely and sparse scene. The sparrows, however, are painted lively and lovingly. One can admire many things in this painting. For example, how well it is preserved after 700 years. After all, it is just painted with ink on paper. One can admire the many shadings of the ink, an effect that had been achieved merely by diluting the ink more or less. I particularly like how space is used and how the darker Bamboo leaves add weight to the lower part of the picture and point to the ground, while the upper branch evaporates into the sky. This distribution of visual weight feels just right to me.

But when I read the descriptive text by the museum’s curator it was one line that struck me. There, the scroll was called “Muqi’s gentle painting”. And this seemed a strikingly perfect way to describe the feeling expressed in the picture.

Gentleness. The word “gentle” has the same root as “gentil” in Spanish or “gentile” in French. As gentleman, gentilhombre or gentilhomme in the beginning were named men of noble origin. Thus, gentleness came not necessarily into play there. Only in the 19th century “gentleman” developed into an educational ideal to produce men (or women) who were educated, well-behaved, mannered and polite.

But true gentleness from the heart, I believe, cannot be taught. All the drive we feel when we are young, our ambitions, aspirations, desires and hopes rub against others and the world and work against gentleness. Most of us spend their lives asserting themselves against others and the world. Never, it seems, has this been truer than in our times of personal branding, “I” and “Me” and the credo of getting rich and famous.

Gentleness comes from selflessness and compassion, after we have abandoned our ambitions and our anger and despair over the fact that the world doesn’t work like we want. Gentleness is a reward life might or might not grant us after we have learned to see the world not with us in the centre. Gentleness is the last stage of wisdom.

Thus, gentleness is indeed a sign of nobility but a nobility of the mind not a nobility of birth. It comes from compassion for the fragility of all existence and human endeavours in particular.

Muqi’s painting, I think, radiates gentleness like a light in the dark. One must have observed for a long time (and dare I say: with a sympathetic mind) to paint the sparrows so lively and with a soft sense of humour. They sit there in the rain just like we when, as it habitually does, life rains down on us.

Bamboo has been since long a symbol for honesty, modesty and chastity. It is, together with plum, orchid and chrysanthemum, called in China one of the “Four Gentlemen” of plants. Together with pine and plum it is also called one of the “Three Friends in Winter” because it stays green during the cold season. Honesty, modesty and chastity are all part of the monastic codex in Zen, so maybe the symbolism spoke to Muqi, the monk. In the picture they build the basis for the sparrows to weather the rain. Meaning and symbolism are multi-layered in Chinese painting and we can forever continue to speculate about what the painter might have had in mind.

In the end, I think, this matters less than the overall sentiment of the picture. It emanates the forgiving understanding of a man who has taken a gentle outlook on the world. And it was when this message of how we can see at the world in compassion and gentleness reached out to me over the chasm of 700 years that a little cloud reached my eyes.

To me this picture also contains a hard lesson. All striving for skills is not enough. It is this elusive depth of gentleness that makes the picture. In order to become a better photographer I have to become a better person. There is no place to hide from this insight.

Page 1 of 2