Abstract Photos
My fellow student Doug — a film, photography, and lighting teacher — showed us some incredibly beautiful images today where he made photographs of the ocean look like abstract paintings. Naturally, I couldn’t wait to fool around with my camera, trying to teach myself this new way of looking at things.
My images didn’t quite achieve abstraction, but ‘messing up’ on purpose — “making the familiar strange” — is a not-too-boring and awfully enjoyable way to spend an hour.
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The Practice of Contemplative Photography, a book by Buddhist meditators Andy Karr and Michael Wood, who themselves were inspired by some of Chögyam Trungpa Rinpoche’s photographs, has been calling my name for over a year now. Time to finally check it out of the library and practice some of its exercises. (They used to have a web site with exercises and example submissions, but I can’t find it anymore . . .)
It was seeingfresh.com, but I’m getting a 404 server error when trying to access the site. Weird.
Yeah, me too! Bummer; I was excited about the site. Seems like maybe their domain subscription expired?
Their site here (http://pontos.dharma.art.br/) is still up :)
Oh, is that by the same folks? Thanks, Justin! I don’t remember the seeingfresh site being in Spanish and English; this is neat.
It is in Portugese (it is out of Brazil), and they are affiliated. I talked to Andy Karr on facebook, and he said the seeingfresh.com site was down because it was hacked, and that they should have it up again soon.
Cool, thanks Adam. I’m also digging their tumblr: delish.
Oh yes, I love their tumblr. They’ve featured a photo or two of mine there (shameless self promotion). I really love how they interact with their readers by featuring their content and being very approachable.
I think the photography’s “talking”! I’m able to access http://seeingfresh.com/ today. I also recommend the poet Barbara Henning’s flickr stream. She’s been publishing her photography and writing of “place” together. (Her early ’70s photos are great, too.) http://www.flickr.com/photos/barbhenn/
xoxo