David Ulrich - The Mindful Photographer: Awake in the World with a Camera

AWAKE IN THE WORLD WITH A CAMERA

DAVID ULRICH

The Mindful Photographer

David Ulrich

Project editor: Maggie Yates

Project manager: Lisa Brazieal

Marketing manager: Mercedes Murray

Copyeditor: Maggie Yates

Layout: Hespenheide Design

Cover design: Hespenheide Design

ISBN: 978-1-68198-841-2

1st Edition (1st printing, February 2022)

2022 David Ulrich

All images David Ulrich unless otherwise noted

The essay Pictures Are Not About Pictures was originally published by Breathing ColorTM, breathingcolor.com Excerpts of the essay, Music of the Spheres, were originally published in Parabola, To Honor the Sacred, Vol 42. No.3, Fall 2017

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Printed in Korea

I fell in love with photography as a child. After receiving a Kodak Brownie Starmatic camera for Christmas, I became fascinated with the visual world. Learning to see became my passion, then my lifelong quest, and I have never looked back.

For me, photography is many things: a means of interacting more deeply with the world, a path of personal growth and transformation, a challenge to strive toward becoming more whole and attentive, a catalyst for stimulating creative expression, and a vehicle for insight and understanding. Photography can be an inner practice that leads you more fully into a rich engagement with the world and a platform for sharing your questions, observations, and discoveries. Its a way of light and a way of life.

What could be more beautiful than a medium of light? And what could be more seductive and compellinga device in our hands that is a metaphor for and an extension of our very brain and nervous system? If you add to this recipe our eyes, mind, and heart, you have a potent mixture called photography. Its no wonder it is so popular.

Most everyone has a camera and takes pictureslots of them. And many people frequentlyeven incessantlyuse visual communication: on social media, on websites, in printed material, and in personal messages. Now that the broad public has discovered photography and smartphone vendors update and promote their excellent cameras on a regular basis, where and how do people learn to make good pictures and communicate effectively with images? How can you learn, in a hands-on way, the resonant potentials of the photographic medium and to explore your own potential as an artist?

As a photography teacher, I must say, business is booming. I am teaching in a wider variety of venues than ever before: colleges, adult education workshops, museum schools, working with children and special interest groups, and in various online forms of interaction. Its hard to keep up with the demand. But it has been said that in the classroom the teacher is often the one who learns the most. I have learned much about photography and culture and peoplemore than I could have ever hoped forthrough my frequent classroom interactions. I feel blessed and privileged.

One of the ways I organize my discoveries and express my insights is through writing. This forms my personal motivation for this book. My previous book, Zen Camera:Creative Awakening with a Daily Practice in Photography, contains six lessons that help you engage the path of photography for creative expression, inner growth, and awakening of your natural wisdom. When I wrote Zen Camera, I found it challenging to fit the depth and breadth of my many observations and teaching tools within the structure of six lessons. I knew another book was on the horizon.

The Mindful Photographer furthers the material found in Zen Camera and provides a deeper look at my teaching methods and hard-earned advice that I offer my students in one way or another in most of the classes I teach.

In the late 60s, one of my principal teachers, photographer Minor White, was hired as a professor at MIT for an academic experiment, to see if an involvement in art and photography could help scientists, engineers, and other left-brained people become better workers, thinkers, and citizens. The experiment worked brilliantly but this initiative must be renewed, today, and needs to reach as many people as possible in these fractured, changing times.

Similarly, people come to my classes from all walks of life with diverse ages, cultural backgrounds, interests, and professions. Many are passionate about photography and most of them have no interest in becoming professional photographers. They want to unlock the richness of their creative spirit. They all have a camera; some own high-end SLRs and others use the optics in their cell phone. They are united in the fact that they are all searching for something that goes beyond simply taking better pictures.

On the first day, each student states their reasons for attending the class. I am consistently moved. Some of them recognize that the joy, fulfillment, and freedom found in an active engagement with creativity has eluded them or dried up in the face of their busy lives and multiple responsibilities. Others feel that something is missing in their lives, an essential sense of wonder and attentive respect for the world surrounding them. They have become jaded and cynical. And yet others feel internally fractured and believe that contact with the creative arts may stimulate their personal growth toward wholeness and awareness.

Self-knowledge is an oft-stated goal, as is a deeper engagement with the world itself through responsive seeing. Photography is unique in that it asks for both an inward look and outward gaze simultaneously. With its reliance on seeing and being in the moment, photography is a potent metaphor for how we might live our lives. With its necessity of a creative response to the moment in front of us, the medium offers an actual practice for living our lives with fullness, sanity, goodness, and responsibility.