Photography: The Search for Ephemeral Worlds

The other day, I tried to list everything that contributes to a good photo. What are the crucial ingredients? High on the list were two things: thinking actively about composition in the field, and deliberate and careful post-processing. But what sustains the activity of going and taking those photos in the first place? What provides that crucial energy?

Such a question delves into the philosophical and leaves behind technique. When other photographers talk about their technical methods, they are often useful but none too surprising. What drives a person to take photos, however, can be far more perplexing. Technique may be how to do something, but it doesn’t explain the why.

So, why? Maybe I cannot speak to the answer for everyone, but I can at least think about why I do photography myself. Could it be the social aspect of sharing photos, some chance for recognition? Or the thrill of the hunt in bird photography? These have some bearing, perhaps, but for me the greatest source of sustenance is a sense of emptiness.

The notion of emptiness I’m referring to is what the Zen Buddhist teacher Shunryu Suzuki called a direct experience of reality, which is a little different than the word emptiness in common English parlance. Emptiness as I use it refers much more to a lack of idea of self, where you are one with an activity without ego.

This search for emptiness is a quest for ephemeral worlds. Yesterday, against the dry wild grasses waving in the wind, I saw the pale moon rise, gaining strength in the darkening sky. An entire world in an instant. Capturing that world is emptiness of the self, because you can be in that world without preconception. I am sure that is why, for me, photography is so peaceful.

What makes a good photo? When I look back at my favourites, I could tell you what distinguishes them from all the others. Composition? Light? Those are important, but they’re not what I had in mind. Rather, my favourites were ones where I had that direct experience of becoming the world in the viewfinder, of pressing the shutter, and only after having the realization of, “oh yes, I am here”. The melting of the self into a single transient moment is what makes a good photo.

That’s not to say that I have a recipe or a knack for taking good photos. I often take shots I prefer to delete, even when I’ve enjoyed the moment of the photo. Others are experiments, or just plain mysteries of the process. Maybe I tried to find emptiness, but something got in the way, leaving me with only a faint sense of an existence dissolving into nothingness. But a genuine resonance with the scene means good composition and good lighting because it is our own way of communicating intimately with the world, and receiving something good in return.

Methods and photographic technique are important. But after learning, practicing… why do I go out again and again? I just want to see those worlds again, plain, without any judgment or evaluation. It’s a simple love of nature, and a desire to connect with it in some way. We come from the universe, and that is what ultimately supports us, even if we sometimes hide it under the opaque veil of our own mental noise.

What makes a good wildlife photographer? A craving for solitude comes to mind. But one cannot always have solitude in a literal sense. Maybe a serene scene can be interrupted by a helicopter overhead, or a dog barking in the distance. But even if the literal solitude is interrupted, one can still seek for those ephemeral worlds that provide an instant of solitude, something to hold onto as a reminder of our primordial beginnings.

I think all human beings have the instinct to seek out this solitude as an echo of the void from which we came, though it’s not always clear how to find it. With photography, we convert the chaos of memory cards and cameras and the noise of the darkest shadows into a single photograph. Sometimes, we find what we are looking for, and that is the magic of the photo.

Some months ago, I lay on the grass in Brazil and found through the viewfinder a Southern Lapwing. I had a moment of finding the emptiness within the world of the Lapwing, and it became my favourite shot of this species. In a world where little seems to make sense, a Lapwing on the grass makes the most sense of all. When you find an intimate moment with a bird or a mountain or a forest, the life of what is in front of you becomes your life for just one instant.

All of this might sound mystical, but I believe that if it seems so, it is only because we have been saturated with mechanical rationality. Outside in the wild, amongst the trees and smell of vegetation and singing birds, it makes perfect sense.

In one respect, that is why I find AI so abhorrent in art. Beyond its immediate dangers, AI also is the next level of a process whose overarching philosophy places no emphasis on the personal discovery of worlds. Instead, there is just the glorifying of a final product so that it can act as a fertilizer for the growth of a soulless system.

These days, times may seem more uncertain than ever. However, in the surrounding chaos, we can always find new reasons to take a photograph. Perhaps it’s a new camera or lens, or a week’s vacation to the tropics. But I beyond that, if we want to continually have the opportunity for exploration through photography, we must return to being surrounded by raw existence. And once there, we must hope that we can once more stumble onto emptiness in one of those ephemeral worlds, before it disappears in the blink of an eye.