The Times Quotidian

Photography and the Dream of Form, Part 1: Batchelor
By Guy Zimmerman

Contrary to popular belief, machines, technology, do not exist to enslave us, or to limit or retard our spiritual growth. Rather, technology exists to liberate us from Cartesian habits of mind so that we can embody hitherto undernourished aspects of our potential for awareness. To see what I mean, examine the photograph to the right on your screen.

The meat in the image is red but probably it’s flowers instead of meat and just a little out of focus such that it appears meat-like. What’s in focus must be water, but since water is transparent you can’t actually see it. The shadow of three fingers and a thumb that interrupt the cool stripe of reflected light is in focus so, yes, probably there is water, and the flowers that look meat-like float just below the surface of the water. Actually, in the lower of the two cool stripes of light you can see the rest of the hand and the arm it is attached to, so definitely the red material is not meat at all, though it still might not be flowers. Whatever it is you can’t turn away because the image is delicious to the eye. There are those rich, blendy colors and the invisible water, and the general sense of stealing a moment from the past and savoring it now because why not?

In another image we’re on a boat looking through a window into a dining room which itself includes three windows framing a view of water far below. Very faint and in the distance, there’s a darker line of land. But actually, we’re high enough above the water so it couldn’t possibly be a boat at all. Probably it’s simply a restaurant on a promontory above a sea or river, the Loire river perhaps, given the title of the photograph: “Val de Loire.” As before, this otherwise unremarkable subject matter is complicated by intervening layers of reflection and transparency, which serve to elevate it toward the sublime. It’s the kind of scene we enter and leave several times a day without noticing the complex yet quiet harmony.

The hull of a caved-in boat, an empty hallway, a drinking glass – the variety of subject matter is as striking as the consistency of the photographer’s concerns. The scenes are busy enough to embody the full chaos of experience while also resolving toward a provisional order. In each case poetic effects are created through optical refraction, reflection and transparency. These are photographs that revel in the continual flux of visual experience, celebrating complexity. And yet despite the weave of surfaces, each image manages to record a unified event of light and moment. They are the product of someone with extraordinary powers of attention, and their aim is to undercut reductive tendencies of mind by seeding doubt, provoking always the question: what is this?

To gain clarity on what the photographer is up to, we can view each of these photographs as embodying five distinct properties or factors. First, each photograph represents a moment of contact between a specific visual field and the light sensitive emulsion in the camera. Next, each image is imbued with a singular, distinctive feeling tone. Third, each photograph represents an act of discernment, meaning that the mechanism of the camera has been constructed (and then deployed by the photographer) to convey a world that makes sense spatially to our eyes. These photographs each embody an act of attention – the photographer has focused his lens on a specific frame chosen out of all the possible frames in that time and place. Finally, each photograph represents an act of intention – to celebrate the beauty of an image and offer it to others. These five qualities – contact, feeling tone, discernment, attention and intention – are referred to in Buddhist arcana as the nama-rupa (name-form) factors. They are five qualities that are present in each moment of consciousness, and what little I know about them I learned from an audio taped lecture by the writer and teacher Stephen Batchelor, who also happens to be the man who took the photographs I now write about.

Batchelor is an iconoclast who has practiced extensively in both Tibetan and Korean Zen. Remaining strongly independent, he is one of the most eloquent proponents of a distinctly agnostic approach to Buddhism that emphasizes secular and pragmatic aspects of practice. In beautifully written books such as Alone with Others, The Awakening of the West, the remarkable gem called Buddhism Without Belief, Living with the Devil and also a translation of Nagarjuna’s Verses from the Center, Batchelor “engages in a critical exploration of Buddhism’s role in the modern world.” His work as an artist is fully in this mode, and it’s the trajectory of his career that I appreciate most. Under the influence of a transformative practice we see an articulate sensibility simplifying out into wonder.

It’s the third of the nama-rupa elements, discernment, that I think Batchelor wants most to put pressure on with his photography. His photographs hold us right at the moment where the mind casts its lot with a hard-and-fast interpretation of sense data presented by the visual field. The jaws of the mental apparatus are kept open for a moment. We do not hurtle forward from an interpretation open to revision to a solid belief on which the girders of the self can be firmly planted in its endless campaign for a separate, unchanging and solid existence. The camera, that mechanism of certainty, is here used to undermine confining delusions that constrict our lives, causing us to suffer unnecessarily.

Part of the reason the camera is able to do this kind of thing so effectively is that we understand it to offer an “objective” take on the world. With a painted image the issue is obscured by the more direct engagement with another subjectivity. In photography the question of whether or not we are reading the image correctly comes immediately to the fore. The technology of the camera is doing the “discernment” work our eye-brain typically does, and this allows us to step back from the mechanical tendencies that narrow and limit our own minds. In so doing, Batchelor’s photographs remind us of the gorgeous strangeness of the world we inhabit, and which we are too conditioned in habits of perception to savor appropriately.

Aesthetically, the result of all this is something called beauty. The photographs are moments of presence in which the covert and fleeting harmony of the everyday world moved Batchelor to raise the camera-mechanism and press the button. They are moments of union between the luminous world and a perceiver of that world delivered with mystery intact. The presence is contagious, communicative, the images drawing us closer to our heartbeats and to the ongoing miracle of perception.