New Takes on Shooting Portraits

Asha, Smriti, and Visha

The Banthias got together for Thanksgiving and chose to spend a full afternoon of their special time together posing for a family portrait with me. This was the first pro photo shoot I've done since the abortive shoot with Greg last May. Once again it restored to me full-force why I want to do photography. Capturing the visual essences of people is incomparable joy! 

In ordinary discourse we gloss over the physical presence of the people with whom we share physical space and energy. We listen to what they say and try to respond with our own expressions of self. Ordinary gatherings with other people are largely intellectual, mediated through the audible expression of our presence. Photography is unabashedly visual. When I take photographs I respond to their physical energy but the medium of capture is visual. 

The physical space in which this capture occurs is significant. One day I'll learn to take onsite images but for now the blank, white background works very well for me. Against this white space, the subjects come to life in unusual vividness of color, line and shape. Music, I've found out, is a significant component of the process of capturing personal energies. Although the still camera does not capture sound, music plays on us emotionally and influences our physical expression. We started the shoot with my choice of music—Mozart chamber music and Strauss lieder—but when we had settled down the energy took a new direction when the Banthia children brought in their choice of music—modern Ballywood dance music.

All this is probably hocus-pocus, frilly figments of imagination. Professionally one should speak about lighting and resolution, composition and color balance. I have much yet to learn about lighting but I think I am now more comfortable using the lights I have (though they are mostly intended for video capture than for still work). If I didn't have Photoshop to adjust exposure, white balance and fill light, lighting would be more complicated and manual controls not effective. The main component I can't change with processing is depth of field, which affects the clarity and blur. I left the soft box on all the time, just moving it closer or farther from the subjects. I turned on and off the three other lights. While I achieved effects that I think improved on the resulting images I forgot that hard lights cast shadows more easily than soft box.

More than ever I appreciated shadows cast on the subjects. These are the shadows I like because even with flattened lights they give dimensionality to the images. Soft light is great but it's the hardness of light that gives complexity and perhaps ultimately the drama so vital to images that touch and move us.

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The Dynamics of Zooming

Santiago de Compostela 2009

Bursting out of one's comfort zone does not take much. It can be as small as going to another part of the city I have not driven to before, or going out on a limb to make new friends, or learning about subcultures like cage-fighting or suburban living in Indianapolis. Getting extruded out of one's routines does not take much but feels like such a big deal. Maybe this is because of the sluggish, slovenly pace my life took when I decided to take a sabbatical from my active professional life. A year and a half of waking up to a day I can design as I wish inured me to listlessness instead of focus and joy. I needed to challenge my rote life.

No matter that taking initiative is often what change takes, aiming for a goal seems to me not the shaping power in change. The major changes in my life came either as corollary to what I have undertaken or, even more often, irrelevant to where I have set my goal on the horizon of possibilities. Ultimately this is my basis for hope: that what proves significant comes out of the blue, from beyond the corner of what I see. The possibilities I see are not as great as those beyond my ken, beyond me. 

Years ago an Indian moksha yogi explained to me how he saw the dynamics of mystical states. The adhika, the striver, must indeed take the first step and work his way as close as possible to the goal but all he can attain at the most is to bring himself to the cliff edge. Something else, something alien to him, must pluck him from the edge and carry him like a cloud to the other side. Again and again we bring ourselves cliffside. Many times then nothing happens. The edge begins to lose its sharpness and still nothing. Then out of the craven blue it comes and suddenly we're nowhere familiar and predictable. We've leapt without leaving the ground but our feet stand somewhere new, our eyes look with new colors and clarity, we zoom past ourselves into change.

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Why are you photographing me?

Judith Fox's book of photographs about her Alzheimer's-ravaged husband, I Still Do, is being published this month. 

She spoke to Terry Gross on Fresh Air on November 19. The podcast kept me company on my walk through the dark condominium grounds tonight. The exchange between the two women provoked contemplation about my interest and work in photography.

I haven't done a photo shoot since the abortive shoot with Greg last May.

Now I am poised to resume deliberate, "serious" photography again on Friday. A friend asked me to do portraits of her family when they come together this weekend for Thanksgiving. I am excited about breaking out my professional background and lights again. I checked my two Canon cameras tonight and ascertained they were relatively dust-free, dust being a frequent bane when using older cameras with interchangeable lenses and without digital lens-cleaning systems like newer cameras have. I chose the lenses I plan on using at the shoot and after putting together my kit decided I might as well take it to the Thanksgiving dinner at Ria's tomorrow. She said she'd like it if I took photos of her and her family. 

The ebb and flow of creative activity intrigues me. A week ago I didn't know how I was going to jump-start project-working again. On Saturday, Visha and Babu came for meditation and asked if I could do her family portraits. Last Monday I had lunch with Arron and Seth and we talked about my doing a documentary of Arron's cage-fighting activities. I would shoot him training for MMA fights, lifting weights with Seth (who is acting as informal weights trainer for his roommate), his actual fights (if he can secure permission from the promoters), and interviews about his dreams and experiences. In fact last Monday as we talked I identified a topic that would be very interesting to shoot in a video. His description of what he felt before, during and after a fight was eerily similar to what I feel after vipassana meditation. I am intrigued by the possible links between intentionally violent action and the non-action in meditative absorption. At heart my interest remains what it was during my 30-year career dealing with clinical mental states. In fact the interest antedated the career. Some of us are born actors, some, like me, contemplative from the get-go.

Fox's husband, Dr. Edmund Ackell, was diagnosed with Alzheimer's just three years after the then fifty-four-year-old Fox married him. He was even then an eminent surgeon, a pilot and golfer. In ten years he lost all these abilities. Now he could barely shave himself and just months ago Fox finally moved him to a facility that could better care for his now almost totally disabling affliction. But in her interview with Gross, Fox said she started to photograph her husband after reading The Model Wife of Arthur Ollman, a book about iconic male photographers for whom their wives were both models and their muses. She wanted to photograph her own muse, her newly married husband who was then seventy years old. Ed's only question to her was, why are you photographing me? She said her husband was a modest man and he couldn't understand why she would want to take his pictures. To her he was handsome and her muse. He was 16 years older than she was and she knew the risks she was taking when she married him. As his illness progressed and he began to lose control of himself she asked him if he was okay with her showing candid images of him. He replied that she could show his soul in her photographs provided she did not show his penis!

Photography is about images captured from the relentless streaming that is life. For me, taking photographs is a special kind of looking, a creative way of seeing. A non-photographer skims through the images of his or her life, seeing what is useful to his strategy or purpose. A photographer combs through the flow of images for that one image that is somehow infused with energy, with what I dare call magic. More skilled and experienced photographers, painters, even writers, can describe what the magic is that they strive to capture with their photographs, with paint, or with words. I don't have that facility. Maybe if I did I would have a more productive time of it but I doubt it. Even these skilled, experienced artists talk about the struggle they undergo to find those sweet spots when creativity bursts out and their work sings.

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Being alive: rethinking body, mind and spirit

NPR's Morning Edition carried a story this morning this morning by Louisa Lim (In Japan, 'Herbivore' Boys Subvert Ideas Of Manhood : NPR) about Japan's 'Herbivore' Boys. Here's a CNN video featuring Japanese journalist, Maki Fukosawa, helping the interviewer recognize 'herbivore' men in the passing Tokyo crowd.

Coincidentally, last Monday I watched cafe-fighting videos with my friends, Arron and Seth. Fight Club is alive and thriving in the Indiana hinterlands. Their ultimate goal to go pro and fight on UFC (Ultimate Fighting Championships for you that don't know), these young men fight mano a mano in a cage, no helmets, just gloves on, using whatever fight technique they know from boxing to wrestling and beyond. It is "full contact combat sport" that allows both striking and grappling technique and is said to have originated in mixed-style contests in Europe, Japan and the Pacific Rim in the early 1900s. It became mainstream after the founding of UFC in 1993.

I've never been one to spend the afternoon watching football, much less a boxing event. Bloodletting and injuries are something to be prevented not willfully invited upon one's person but chilling with Arron and Seth last Monday surprisingly intrigued me. Arron's description of how he felt before, during and after a fight strongly reminded me of how I feel after a powerful sitting. The adrenaline rush creates a similar mental state as meditative absorption! In both states ego is relegated to the background or even temporarily disabled. There is only the complete experience of physical sensations held together by a seamlessly whole awareness and time stands still.

Japan's 20- and 30-year-old men are at one end and American cage-fighters at another but they are both expressions of masculinity in search of a character. In a post-nuclear age where battles are fought not in large-scale World-War type, heavy-armor-and-machinery warfare, where politics and religion play out man to naked man, men are re-inventing the masculine experience. We have no choice. The women have changed past recognition. Many of them, like the Japanese 'carnivore' women of Furosawa, have assumed the old-time fighting stance of what we now lambently call the patriarchal age. It looks to me like the eternal seesaw, the fragile dance of Yin and Yang that must preserve the Oneness. If it grows too big here, it must yield there. Or is this more of the hocus-pocus the Communists in China abandoned after its century of humiliation at the hands of the forward-thinking round-eyes, a painful cleansing that prepared the way for that country's current surge into an economic giant confounding the West's doctrine of requisite capitalism founded on democracy?

Just when we think we know it all, the world shows another room in its many mansions of which we were totally unaware and we are spellbound again by its incomprehensibility, an unending fascination that may be at the heart of being alive itself.

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Art East and West

Art in Asia, Edith Hamilton writes, is based on a fundamental attitude that what the senses sense is not real, is illusory and therefore not worth studying or depicting in art. What alone matters is the imagination unfettered by the restrictions of material reality. Hence Egyptian art is focused on the life hereafter and the Hindu religious images are phantasmagoric.

In the West, the Fort Wayne native, one of the first American women intellectuals, writes, art is "the unifier of what is within and what is without." The artist studies actual representatives of the image he wants to paint, a woman, for example, and first looks for models from which he does "studies" before executing his vision of Woman. His art does not look like any of the women he has studied. She is more beautiful, or more noble, more motherly, more alluring, than the models. This is art in the western sense, according to Hamilton. It is based in the experience of the senses but the information is processed by the mind of the artist. He or she distills from the experience of the many the essence of all of them or those of them that fits the concept he or she wants to embody in art.

Hamilton's book might be dated. Her statements about Greek sculpture suggest she knew the plain, unvarnished marble as how they originally looked. She praises their simple lines, the bareness of vision (similar, by the way, to what Buddhist meditation produces, something else Hamilton was ignorant of), whereas we now believe these statues were slathered in bright, gory paint when they adorned Greek temples and public places. But what she writes holds true for much of what we still hold as true today, eighty years after the book was published. Does this make her statements and our current beliefs true? Not so, but true enough to make us listen and pay attention.

Art is only fable when based solely on imagination. It must either start from a fragment of reality, whether this be an undesired commission from someone wanting to pay us for the work or a glimpse of a vision that enthralls us for no reason, or somehow incorporate into its fabrication something impossible to ignore from our daily experience of life. It must grow organically out of the soil of our material existence. Art must spring as Pallas Athena is said to have done, full-grown from her father's thigh. Art must be coupled with our experience of the material reality on which and maybe from which life of the spirit, of the mind, of the imagination can then fashion something that in turn engages someone else's eye through his or her inner vision. 

To be genuine, art must come from the gutter, as Oscar Wilde said we all lay in: some us though while lying there are looking at the stars.

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Leisure according to the ancient Greeks

Wall Ornament, House of Cheung

Born in Asia and becoming an adult in the West I am an amalgamation of East and West. A native of the Philippines has inherent complexity. The Philippines is the cultural mongrel of Asia. His country a Spanish or North American colony for 300 years, Filipinos look Malayo-Polynesian but think and feel like a European or North American. Appearance doesn't quite jibe with what comes out when a Filipino talks about himself or his life. That I've more of my life in the U.S. than in my native land adds patina to the toss. I am an American but not your average American. I belong and not-belong. It's a conundrum that has haunted and inspired me, loaded me with cutting-edge advantage and disadvantage.

For years I've simmered in this poly-cultural stew. I came to America fleeing from a life where I felt I didn't belong. America liberated me intellectually. The mind and the life of the mind was at home here but a new force came into being. If in the Philippines I longed for a bigger sea in which to swim, in America I have that ocean of almost infinite dimensions but curiosity has transmogrified. Now I am even more curious about a visionary divide. I switch spectacles every moment or so, now looking about me as Asian-born, now as West-acculturated. That edge between fascinates me no end.

Edith Hamilton's 1930 book (republished with additional chapters in 1942), The Greek Way, added fuel to my schizoid identity. She has reminded me wherein conflict occurs and the delicious taste of my fence-straddling persona. This is an issue that only now perhaps I have the wherewithal to confront. All my working life I thought someday I would retire and then have the time to read all the books, listen to all the CDs, watch all the DVDs that I've accumulated since coming to consumerist America. I don't consider myself retired today because I can't accept the idea of sitting still and enjoying the leisure. Hamilton pointed out that the word school is akin to the ancient Greek σχολή, which according to Bill Casselman (billcasselman.com), meant "leisure time to use for learning important life insights." 

I am not retired; I am in school, closer to the Greek idea than our driven, modern experience of school. Casselman again wrote that for Aristotle, schole or leisure was not do-nothing time. It was the "most useful of times, time you set aside for your learning." He quoted Aristotle who in his Politics wrote: The first principle of all action is leisure. Both are required, but leisure is better than occupation and is its end." How true!

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Long Absence from Family Trips

Since early September I have been on the road a lot, since October 2 with family. We're on our way back to Kansas from a five-day stay in Las Vegas. While Maria attended a conference at Mandalay Bay Resort, we explore the Filipino subculture in Vegas and one day drove out to Red Rock Canyon where this photo was taken. I should be back in Indianapolis on Sunday.

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