Duende Arts

Teachers say that in Buddhism once the thought arises to pursue enlightenment the very structure of mind changes. The goal may not be reached until after many lifetimes but the impetus once created never goes away again. So unlike its course in North America and Europe, Buddhism in Asia became inextricably linked with just the ordinary living of life, sometimes fun and exciting, sometimes momentously sad or monotonous, but like the dominant figure in the carpet background that most people no longer sees, the aspiration ticks away indecorously slow but always there. I remember a Tibetan shopkeeper in the village in New York City telling me how the Dharma among his people was as ordinary and unobtrusive as sunshine and rain. It is part of life; it is life. They prepare supper at night, might spend 50 years building up a trade, but in the background is this unspoken goal to seek the Ultimate and become free at last from life's vicissitudes. Unspoken because it is so taken for granted until one day the bud opens and the muddy water drips away as water drips away.

It has been thirty years since I encountered Buddhism not in the land of its birth but in my adopted country. Buddhism was a big part of my going home again, home where I had thought I never belonged. I like the simplicity of its practice, the barebones approach that depend solely on one's effort and utilizing only one's own mind and body. Anything else is excess. A cushion to sit on does help. Rituals inherently human can support the most genuine aspiration for simplicity. They create a feeling of what is sacred, recreate the awesome experience of something beyond words, beyond desire, beyond the very habits of being alive.

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Today 17 more seconds of daylight are added to the day. We are inching our way towards summer!

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I did another portrait shoot with Linda and her family last Monday. I've processed six images from the shoot while still having to redo processing the Banthia images I want to burn on a DVD for the parents to take to Orlando next week. This photo of Linda was taken by my Sony HD camcorder that I had set to record on its own while I took still photos with the Canon 5D. The resolution is much smaller but the effect, as Linda commented when I sent her the photo, was "complimentary to my age." I need to learn to use the sharpening commands in Photoshop to soften the effect of the bright lights I use in studio shoots. A design consultant I saw who has a degree in photography and film from IU Bloomington made a similar comment. She asked me why I was using hard lights. I had gradually started using more hard lights in my shoots, not just for the background but for the foreground. With Linda's shoot I was careful enough to use only the soft box and an umbrella-filtered light for the faces. Before the clients came I took preliminary photos using manual camera controls and was surprised at the stunning clarity but once they got here I threw caution to the air and shot pellmell. The boy was uncontrollable and finally brought the backdrop down. The soft box light kept going out. I should have checked the images on the camera LCD but didn't, an almost fatal mistake. There is so much to learn and to do.

Meanwhile yesterday I went with Arron to Elite Martial Arts where I spoke with the owner who told me he wanted a commercial to draw more people to his center. He wanted a surprisingly artistic video, with a specific look and audio background. He may need additional documentary-style videos to actually show prospective customers what it is he does at the center. I have so far only been using iMovie putting off using FCP again. It's been four years or more since I learned to use FCP in NYC!

I'd lamented at the lack of drive in my desire to create commercial photography and videos. I need the structure of deadlines to keep me at the wheel. When structure comes I feel stressed out by all that I need to do to turn out a creditable product. The lesson perhaps is learning to go with the flow, to appreciate the down times as well as the up times and make the most of what I can do and do.

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It takes so little to grow a weak flicker into a fire. The wonder of it is how infrequent I do the talk.

My client didn't show up this morning but I was at the computer early so I started messing around. Before I knew it I had learned to use the video camera on the 5th generation iPod Nano. Granted this was not a herculean task but one thing led to another. By 5:30 this afternoon, I had set up a meeting with Arron to see first-hand an MMA fight in Zionsville tomorrow evening and I'd started the confounding mysteries of using Flash. I went to Lifestyle Fitness and for the first time working out there was not as uncomfortable. Again this was no big feat. I simply used the treadmill at 4 mph while watching music videos on an HD monitor 20 feet away but as I was driving home in the dark this evening listening to a performance of Brahms's German Requiem I was feeling the creative juices bubbling inside me, a sensation that had been eluding me since I came home from the trip to Las Vegas with my sisters.

The iPod video is on my Facebook page: http://www.facebook.com/pages/Duende-Arts-Photography-Videos/194848773479?ref=search&sid=740460032.1486545904..1

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The portrait shoot with the Banthias was instructive on several levels. I used automatic camera settings all throughout, manipulating white balance and exposure post-shoot in Photoshop. I shot with manual settings with Brandon and lost so many images. Maybe with more practice I'll get better at doing manual-setting photography but maybe I've found the process that works for me in this shoot with the Banthias.

I shoot quickly, only making lighting changes when I really have to e.g. to avoid obvious, undesirable shadows. I should probably learn to be more deliberate with lighting and camera settings but when I have a model or models with me the excitement is hard to resist. I take as many shots as I can. I end up with hundreds of images that becomes a challenge to process from just the sheer number. If I set up the lights and camera settings more carefully, I'll have fewer images to review and process. Will I be missing out on images that I'll like?
This image was unplanned. I simply took advantage of the situation and hoped for the best. The women were arranging their saris when I took this photo. I should probably make it a point to let the models know that I want to take photos "behind the scenes" and set up a camera to do just this.

I shoot a lot of images because many times the image I want is an image I had not planned on getting. I direct the models into situations or poses that I think should yield the image we want but it's the spontaneous take that often yields the harvestable image.

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Judith Fox's book of photographs about her Alzheimer's-ravaged husband, I Still Do, is being published this month. 

She spoke to Terry Gross on Fresh Air on November 19. The podcast kept me company on my walk through the dark condominium grounds tonight. The exchange between the two women provoked contemplation about my interest and work in photography.

I haven't done a photo shoot since the abortive shoot with Greg last May.

Now I am poised to resume deliberate, "serious" photography again on Friday. A friend asked me to do portraits of her family when they come together this weekend for Thanksgiving. I am excited about breaking out my professional background and lights again. I checked my two Canon cameras tonight and ascertained they were relatively dust-free, dust being a frequent bane when using older cameras with interchangeable lenses and without digital lens-cleaning systems like newer cameras have. I chose the lenses I plan on using at the shoot and after putting together my kit decided I might as well take it to the Thanksgiving dinner at Ria's tomorrow. She said she'd like it if I took photos of her and her family. 

The ebb and flow of creative activity intrigues me. A week ago I didn't know how I was going to jump-start project-working again. On Saturday, Visha and Babu came for meditation and asked if I could do her family portraits. Last Monday I had lunch with Arron and Seth and we talked about my doing a documentary of Arron's cage-fighting activities. I would shoot him training for MMA fights, lifting weights with Seth (who is acting as informal weights trainer for his roommate), his actual fights (if he can secure permission from the promoters), and interviews about his dreams and experiences. In fact last Monday as we talked I identified a topic that would be very interesting to shoot in a video. His description of what he felt before, during and after a fight was eerily similar to what I feel after vipassana meditation. I am intrigued by the possible links between intentionally violent action and the non-action in meditative absorption. At heart my interest remains what it was during my 30-year career dealing with clinical mental states. In fact the interest antedated the career. Some of us are born actors, some, like me, contemplative from the get-go.

Fox's husband, Dr. Edmund Ackell, was diagnosed with Alzheimer's just three years after the then fifty-four-year-old Fox married him. He was even then an eminent surgeon, a pilot and golfer. In ten years he lost all these abilities. Now he could barely shave himself and just months ago Fox finally moved him to a facility that could better care for his now almost totally disabling affliction. But in her interview with Gross, Fox said she started to photograph her husband after reading The Model Wife of Arthur Ollman, a book about iconic male photographers for whom their wives were both models and their muses. She wanted to photograph her own muse, her newly married husband who was then seventy years old. Ed's only question to her was, why are you photographing me? She said her husband was a modest man and he couldn't understand why she would want to take his pictures. To her he was handsome and her muse. He was 16 years older than she was and she knew the risks she was taking when she married him. As his illness progressed and he began to lose control of himself she asked him if he was okay with her showing candid images of him. He replied that she could show his soul in her photographs provided she did not show his penis!

Photography is about images captured from the relentless streaming that is life. For me, taking photographs is a special kind of looking, a creative way of seeing. A non-photographer skims through the images of his or her life, seeing what is useful to his strategy or purpose. A photographer combs through the flow of images for that one image that is somehow infused with energy, with what I dare call magic. More skilled and experienced photographers, painters, even writers, can describe what the magic is that they strive to capture with their photographs, with paint, or with words. I don't have that facility. Maybe if I did I would have a more productive time of it but I doubt it. Even these skilled, experienced artists talk about the struggle they undergo to find those sweet spots when creativity bursts out and their work sings.

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NPR's Morning Edition carried a story this morning this morning by Louisa Lim (In Japan, 'Herbivore' Boys Subvert Ideas Of Manhood : NPR) about Japan's 'Herbivore' Boys. Here's a CNN video featuring Japanese journalist, Maki Fukosawa, helping the interviewer recognize 'herbivore' men in the passing Tokyo crowd.

Coincidentally, last Monday I watched cafe-fighting videos with my friends, Arron and Seth. Fight Club is alive and thriving in the Indiana hinterlands. Their ultimate goal to go pro and fight on UFC (Ultimate Fighting Championships for you that don't know), these young men fight mano a mano in a cage, no helmets, just gloves on, using whatever fight technique they know from boxing to wrestling and beyond. It is "full contact combat sport" that allows both striking and grappling technique and is said to have originated in mixed-style contests in Europe, Japan and the Pacific Rim in the early 1900s. It became mainstream after the founding of UFC in 1993.

I've never been one to spend the afternoon watching football, much less a boxing event. Bloodletting and injuries are something to be prevented not willfully invited upon one's person but chilling with Arron and Seth last Monday surprisingly intrigued me. Arron's description of how he felt before, during and after a fight strongly reminded me of how I feel after a powerful sitting. The adrenaline rush creates a similar mental state as meditative absorption! In both states ego is relegated to the background or even temporarily disabled. There is only the complete experience of physical sensations held together by a seamlessly whole awareness and time stands still.

Japan's 20- and 30-year-old men are at one end and American cage-fighters at another but they are both expressions of masculinity in search of a character. In a post-nuclear age where battles are fought not in large-scale World-War type, heavy-armor-and-machinery warfare, where politics and religion play out man to naked man, men are re-inventing the masculine experience. We have no choice. The women have changed past recognition. Many of them, like the Japanese 'carnivore' women of Furosawa, have assumed the old-time fighting stance of what we now lambently call the patriarchal age. It looks to me like the eternal seesaw, the fragile dance of Yin and Yang that must preserve the Oneness. If it grows too big here, it must yield there. Or is this more of the hocus-pocus the Communists in China abandoned after its century of humiliation at the hands of the forward-thinking round-eyes, a painful cleansing that prepared the way for that country's current surge into an economic giant confounding the West's doctrine of requisite capitalism founded on democracy?

Just when we think we know it all, the world shows another room in its many mansions of which we were totally unaware and we are spellbound again by its incomprehensibility, an unending fascination that may be at the heart of being alive itself.

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