Is mindfulness more than being attentive? What exactly is Mindful Photography?
What does mindfulness have to do with photography? Isn't it a mindful process anyways to create images with a camera? Wherein it is about concentration, attention, directed focus und a some kind of silence in the first place? An intentional procedure, in which an idea is grasped, technology adjusted, an image gets composed, and the shutter is released?
Photography is certainly all that. But if you want to enrich your creative process with a deeper dimension, and provide it with mindfulness, there is more to it. Mindfulness in the original Buddhist meaning transcends the colloquially understood attention, which one dedicates preferable constantly to a specific subject.
Mindfulness ist the Buddhist answer to the existential question, how to create a purpose- and meaningful life. And in the original texts it is a threefold instruction for meditation. In the Sattipatthana Sutta, Buddha's mindfulness teaching from the year 20 BC, he guides monks to reflect upon three aspects - the body including sensory impressions, emotions and their transience, and the mind with regards to its movements.
'From the many', Regensburg, 2021 © Dr. Christine Lehr
And there is another essential reflexion that gets forgotten completely in a more popular mindfulness discourse. For good reason, because these contemplations touch on a socially significant and widespread taboo - death. What do transience, death, consciousness have to do with photography? They all form an integral, decisive element for the specific human perspective behind the camera.
Mindful Photography therefore consists of two important parts - on the one hand a photographic practice, which includes mindfulness techniques into the process of image making. These concrete, mindful instructions, which also can be found in clinically proven MBSR courses (mindfulness based stress reduction), conduce to a change in perspective, a renewal of creativity, and an encounter with oneself in the present moment.
On the other hand, and substantial for other realms of creative expression, too, the idea behind Mindful Photography is more broadly formulated at the same time. Coming from the humble opinion that it is the human being behind the camera (not the equipment or the price of it), who is decisive for the photographic result, aspects of Buddhist philosophy are conveyed, which awaken exciting new insights into one's own, creative dynamics.
What these mindful, photographic techniques are, how Buddhist philosophy is made fruitful for photography, and last but not least, how and why the Buddha changed focal length under the Bodhi tree, can best be experienced and found out at a Mindful Photography Workshop.
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