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Finding Contemplative Time In Modern Life

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Contemple--les-Fleurs
Contempler les Fleurs, transfer print, 1/2 edition variable, 16″ x 21″, © Iskra Johnson

           “Joy is being willing for things to be as they are.”
― Charlotte Joko Beck, Nothing Special

I would also say that joy is seeing and delighting in things as they are, which can be an elusive concept when your life gets caught up in a construction project. Construction projects by definition require making things different. Better. Fixed up. Everything is most definitely not ok as it is, otherwise why are you going to all this debt and trouble?

As I approach the move-in date for my new studio I’ve become aware that for much of the past five months I’ve been completely not-here, now, at all. My tattered meditation practice [Read more…]

Jim Dine at Wright Gallery | The Last Days of Dexter Avenue (As We Knew It)

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It’s a day when the news provokes long discussions of despair and bewilderment on my social media feeds. I find myself in a desperate ricochet between fear of plague, spreading wildfire and epic drought, and I can’t stop thinking of the numbers in Gaza, numbers attached to bodies, bodies attached to the fact of children and hospitals and schools and what can only look to me like slaughter of a trapped people. I hold up a dollar bill and consider what part of it to tear off to protest my taxes going to mortars and grenades.

As I sit in miles of hot stalled traffic I feel increasingly bludgeoned by things beyond my control. This traffic jam is brought to the Emerald City by the Blue Angels. Each summer the freeway closes to honor the Navy’s elite flight squad and the quaint ritual of military preening that carves the sky with white ribbons and shatters eardrums of those below. All I feel as I watch the jets dive between skyscrapers and lilt upward from my rear view mirror is dread. Gaza seems right here, right here in my lap.

I am on my way to see the Jim Dine exhibit at Wright Gallery. [Read more…]

In Neutral: The Gray Muse of Ebey’s Landing

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Unarranged Arrangement
Unarranged Arrangement, Ebey’s Landing, © Iskra Johnson

“The point is, not to resist the flow. You go up when you’re supposed to go up and down when you’re supposed to go down. When you’re supposed to go up, find the highest tower and climb to the top. When you’re supposed to go down, find the deepest well and go down to the bottom. When there’s no flow, stay still. If you resist the flow, everything dries up. If everything dries up, the world is darkness.”
                      ― Haruki Murakami, The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle

I think there is no better place for me to understand equanimity than the slender borderline between land and sea. To walk the shore on a gray day, with a warm wind in my hair and clouds low on the horizon, to become completely lost in the large rocks and the pebbles and the sand, finer and finer gradations of gray and brown and white and coral that the sea tosses up and time burnishes. It’s the middle path. No chasing after sunsets or epiphanies, [Read more…]

Sources of Inspiration: Architectural Photographers Michael Burns & Kim Holtermand

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Today I stumbled upon an essay in Arcade Magazine that will be a source of photographic inspiration for a long time. From photographer Michael Burns, “Desiring the Act…the Experience:”

“As a photographer, I seem to desire an awful lot. Or at least, I want to photograph an awful lot. I don’t desire the object of my intention but the very act of photographing. It’s been said that photographic depiction is a way of having a kind of proxy experience of reality, a way of hiding behind a safe, powerful and voyeuristic stance—making photographs in lieu of direct involvement in the real. But what if the act of photographing is the experience I’m after?

What am I really desiring in my photographic work? Do I really want to experience … to possess every rock in the desert I’m photographing? Every structure, vista, street theatre, woman or man, known or unknown to me? Maybe I want a little of that … maybe. But I certainly desire the photograph. Even more, I desire the act of photographing. The rush of the moment of split-second recognition, valuation and response embedded in an overarching awareness of thousands of photographs I and hundreds of others have made within the history of the medium; the differences between me and all those others who have made pictures before me and, all importantly, the tone of the image—that subtle and persuasive resonance with the instant, the light, framing, meaning and configuration. To sidestep the obvious, to see what others could not have prepared themselves to see, in that very particular way.”

Having read that, I think maybe I don’t have anything more ever to say about Why Take Pictures.

Michael_Burns_Berlin_2
Berlin 1984. Photograph © Michael Burns, Seattle

I called Michael up to ask if I could use an excerpt of the essay and an image or two and we had a great conversation. If you go to his website you will find perhaps the most minimalist and discreet presentation of a photographer’s work you have ever witnessed in this age of Lots of Stuff. [Read more…]

Beauty at the Edge: Highway 99 Revisited

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I am living for awhile in temporary quarters between the Collision Center and the Aurora St. Vincent de Paul’s. My white box in the sky is surrounded by several hundred other white boxes neatly stacked and facing each other’s allotted squares of white venetian blinds. This is called an “apartment complex,” and after documenting the construction of dozens of such projects all over the city it is curious to actually live in one. I looked for several months for a place to stay while my house and studio are under renovation. All politics is personal, and all art is in some way political, in that creative obsessions inevitably run into the economic realities and constructs of power behind them.

For instance, take the economic fact that the smallest of those new boxes in the sky, the ones called “studios” start at $1,300 per month and go up as high as $2,800. [Read more…]