meditations on impermanence

at the risk of sounding absolutely pretentious, i'm going to discuss wabi-sabi and it's influence on me. a couple of years ago, i was in a portfolio review session. it was a group session - there were other photographers there (most of whom were friends, only a couple i didn't know). we were showing our books and the reviewer was commenting on the editing choices, what the pictures meant together, where and what kinds of markets they would make the best impression...etc. so, it comes around to my turn and i think i was last. so that meant i had to wait through everyone else's review and not to be rude (especially to my friends) but you're ... ah... slightly less interested in what's being said about someone else's work. and you're nervous about what's going to be said about your stuff (or at least i was) so you're just kind of buzzing "let's go, let's go, let's go".

anyway. we finally get to me. the reviewer lays my work out on the table. and now i'm nervous because i'm thinking "there's no time left, she's tired from looking at all the others." and so on. (it reminds me of my old gymnastics competitions - you didn't want to go first or last because the judges wouldn't be ready to score high for first routines and had seen too many mistakes by the last routines.)

i really don't remember a lot of what she said. i do remember that she said i could train my lens on anything - any scene / subject and it would all come out looking the same. that the subject didn't matter - it would always look a little damaged or melancholy. something like that.

then this one guy, someone i didn't know, said my work reminded him of 'wabi-sabi'. i thought he was joking, just making up words. "uhm.... what?" i asked him.

"wabi-sabi. it's based on an ancient japanese tea ceremony." i was now openly staring at him with dislike. he was taking up my time with gibberish.

"i don't know the full meaning, but it's based on the beauty in the impermanent, or the transient. you should look it up. your work definitely has that quality."

that was the best comment of the whole session and it was a throw-away critique at the very end. but it has affected my work more than anything else in that session.

wabi-sabi is an ancient japanese way of thinking that was originally reflected in the tea ceremony. these were performed with a reverence for each gesture and action. appreciating only the tea before them and the company in which it was shared. wabi-sabi means beauty that is imperfect, impermanent, and incomplete. objects or images with a wabi-sabi aesthetic can reflect or engender melancholy and longing.

this book is a fairly good primer. when i read it, i saw photos i had already taken. and a way of thinking and feeling i'd long since known.

here are a just a few of my images that completely remind me of this.


a ferris wheel


an old-time wooden roller coaster on the jersey shore

these two images were shot with film - fugi provia 400 pushed to 1600. then i photographed them again using a digital camera while they were on a screen. i was just messing around. but the quality of each of them suggests something you might have seen in a dream, once, that was a little frightening but entirely exciting. or something you remember from years ago, as a teenager, a memory of a time with more promise than it delivered.

these next three are shots of wildflowers in the new mexico desert. then they were blown up on a computer so that they're pixelated and slightly distorted. then they were photographed again. these have always looked to me as if they were straining towards the sun, wanting nothing more than to burn off the memory of evening's chill.