Some Words and Photographs

By John Einarsen

The words attached to a photograph can radically alter how we “read” or understand it. Words give context, intended or unintended. One’s experience of an image often depends on the words that caption it.

My approach to photography is perceptual, which means that my focus is on the direct experience of “seeing.” Therefore, my images never require titles; I want the viewer to experience the image as I experienced it. I don’t want to add a filter (words, in this case) to create some impression, fact or concept. That said, on some occasions I might list the location of where the image was taken, since the one question people inevitably ask about a photograph is: “Where was it taken?” But this is more out of convenience. I make images that are meant to be experienced without words.

That said, an image can also be an inspiration for words. On June 9th of last year, Rebecca Otowa kindly invited me to show some of my Miksang photographs in a SWET-sponsored workshop on Flash Fiction.  I made several small prints, and the seven participants chose ones that intrigued them and then inspired to write something. Here are a few:

The Easel

Nearly an hour had passed, and she lay on her back on the kitchen floor unable to get up. It had struck as she’d begun to chop leeks for the lunch they always shared around noon. Gazing upward now at the clock, she realized she could no longer read it. Were those numerals? They must be.

How much longer would it take him, engrossed in the painting upon his easel… how much hunger to realize that she hadn’t called him? To walk the few steps from his adjoining studio. To find her supine on the checkered linoleum, angrily bleeding inside of her skull?

—Stewart Wachs

 


Haiku

Once I had a form.
The world was too much with me.
I’ll melt away now.
—Rebecca Otowa

To be honest, I find the visual world to be much more vivid than language, which exists for the most part inside our heads. That is why I am a photographer and not a writer. Belonging to a writer’s group is a bit ironic.

Last spring, I held an exhibition of photographs entitled “The Universe at My Feet” in the KG+ section of the Kyotographie International Photography Festival. None of the photographs were titled, but a text provided vital information about my approach and how the images came about. It was important and I include it here:

The Universe at My Feet

Last summer I found myself following a gutter for several blocks in a residential neighborhood in a small town in Colorado. It was a pleasure to discover what the last rain had left. As small children we exist close to  the ground. It is our world, a realm full of wondrous things. Smooth pebbles, mysterious weeds, puddles, mud, asphalt. This is where we learn to navigate reality.

As a child, I loved the gutter on the street in front of our house; in winter, it was here that I collected thin, delicate crystals of ice, placing them carefully in a cigar box that I brought to my mother to keep in the icebox freezer, which existed in another realm far above my head. Those small slivers of ice were treasures, beautiful transformations that I wanted to preserve. As we grow older and enter adulthood, the ground from which we discovered so much slowly recedes from our awareness and memory.

Yet it is always at our feet, an ever-changing universe rich in form, space, texture and delicate formations. Evocative symbols materialize and fade; puddles appear like portals to parallel worlds before evaporating; and then there are scattered leaves. My teacher, Julie Dubose, writes about why they resonate so deeply with us:

“… there is no more pervasive and accessible metaphor for the delicacy and tenderness of our lives and all things in our world that are born, that live and grow old, and then die. Leaves are blown about by the wind, flung far from the tree of their origin, to land helplessly wherever their fate determines…”

At our feet we are able to encounter the continuous undirected activity of our universe and deeply experience the fleeting nature of existence.

—John Einarsen

I have taken more photographs since that exhibition and include a selection of recent work along the same theme. Please enjoy.

 

 

 

 

 

 

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John Einarsen recently published Small Buildings of Kyoto Volume II. Proceeds from sales support the printing of Kyoto Journal. (https://kyotojournal.org/blog-highlights/small-buildings-of-kyoto-is-back/)

Together with Mitsue Nagase, John will hold a Miksang Contemplative Photography Workshop from May 8th to May 12th in Kyoto. (https://kyotojournal.org/blog-highlights/miksang-contemplative-photography-workshop-in-kyoto/)