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You are here: Home / Archives for contemplative photography

Finding Contemplative Time In Modern Life

September 7, 2014 by Iskra 1 Comment

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…]

Filed Under: Digital Collage, Meditation & Buddhism, Photocollage, Photography, Transfer Prints Tagged With: art about chairs, Bleak Beauty, contemplative photography, contemplative time, found beauty, industrial beauty, old chevy, slowing down in modern life

Three Days in Silence: This is Not a Haiku

December 19, 2013 by Iskra 1 Comment

The Road To Cloud Mountain Photocollage
The Road to Cloud Mountain

   “The essence of spiritual practice is remembrance, whether it is remembering to come back  to  the present moment or recalling the truths of impermanence.”
— Andrew Holecek, Tricycle Magazine, Winter 2013

   “Don’t talk, I can’t hear myself see.” –Jerry Saltz

I first visited Cloud Mountain 23 years ago for a seven day silent retreat. At that time a year of insomnia and grief in the wake of my father’s death had taken me to the brink of despair. My view of the world had become dangerously distorted, and if I wanted to come back to my life I needed to take my meditation practice to a different level and rewire my brain. This was before the idea of negativity bias had become commonly accepted in science and spiritual practice, and so in the first days of retreat I spent a lot of time beating myself up for my mind’s inexorable turning towards darkness. By the end of the seven days I had turned enough times to face the other direction that I could now see it existed. The searing images that appear in states of absorption may be only seconds in duration, yet they can powerfully and permanently alter the brain. As well, the steady accrual of mindfulness practice.

I will never forget the feeling of my hands on the steering wheel as I prepared to drive away at the end of the retreat. Did I still know how to drive? I tested the the brake pedal and fiddled with the key. I would start slowly. As I rolled down the hill at three miles per hour I realized that my father was still dead, that a particular sadness was permanent and immutable, and that I was okay. My breathing remained comfortable and calm, and my eyelids didn’t prickle. In that week nothing had changed in the facts of life, but my capacity to carry it had changed. I proceeded to drive directly onto a one-way road into a clear-cut. This is how it is: the world doesn’t stop being itself while I’m being quiet.

Over the several decades since, I have become steadily more happy. Terrible things happen, but without the added burden of taking them personally. When I feel grief I feel myself gathered in a very big net with others. I also increasingly live by this truth:  “Know that joy is rarer, more difficult and beautiful than sadness.” When I saw this quotation from Andre Gide in the description of Cloud Mountain’s December “Discovering Joy” retreat with Lila Kate Wheeler I signed on. Happiness and joy take vigilance, and continual practice. What follows are my notes from memory and a few photographs, taken after the formal retreat had ended.

Devotional Altar
Devotional Altar, Cloud Mountain

[Read more…]

Filed Under: Meditation & Buddhism, The Spiritual in Art Tagged With: buddhist community, cloud mountain, contemplative photography, Lila Kate Wheeler, meditation retreat, negativity bias, silent retreat, the road to cloud mountain

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Morning pages. Reading Wallace Stevens’ ‘13 wa Morning pages. Reading Wallace Stevens’ ‘13 ways of looking at a blackbird’ for the thousandth time and finding it completely new.
Hello solo travelers….are we odd to love the sol Hello solo travelers….are we odd to love the solitude of taking in a place with every one of our senses, unmitigated by the relational bypass legislated by the need to tend to whether the Other is: okay/happy/comfortable/entertained etc…? Tonight I’m sharing notes on my (new) dedicated weekly visit to the travel state of mind, in which I go somewhere in public as though I was a tourist and read and write and armchair travel. 

I love company, don’t get me wrong. I have traveled with, and without. Evenings are not always at ease. In 1990 I went to a Typography Conference in Oxford. Dropped my luggage a week ahead and took a train to the Lakes. Me and every honeymooning couple of the year, in 19th century bed and breakfasts (all booked by pre-internet postal and phone call.) Horsehair mattresses, pineapple-carved bedposts. Two other non-honeymooning people were allowed into the 40-mile square Lakes that month. They did not make eye contact. 

So it was me and Beatrix Potter, and the “jacket potato”, an unfortunate menu staple that involved baked beans + baked potatoes (in far too close proximity) alone with our observations writing letters home to whichever boyfriend it was left behind. (Here I gracefully omit the grand ball under the tent on the Thames back at the conference and everything that happened after. . .) The Thames is why the British invented elipses. 

I had told myself on some errant Tuesday that England was the size of Whidbey Island. It was a rare lapse, in which I completely forgot: world history? Oh, wait, the Beatles. + King Arthur. Stones and tables and swords. Forgive me while I go re-watch the intro to #Outlander….

Daunting to study the guidebook and realize I should have started this project when I was 11. I have been to England three times. I cannot fathom how I thought I could go again and not want to see everything: every cathedral, flea market, moody moor, outsider mural and Arabic bakery, cinematically filtered through a modern mashup of Virginia Woolf and Peaky Blinders.
Amid the clamor and noise of our online lives I fi Amid the clamor and noise of our online lives I find myself sometimes seeking very simple places to land. What better place to land then water? In the series of architectural works in progress one of my subjects is the Chittenden Locks. You can’t have the locks without the water that lives to be raised and lowered. These subtle tethers between invisible guide posts and unseen actors offstage speak to me not just of infrastructure and industry, but of our connections to one another. 

I live in a city that has decided resolutely that Zoom is the same as actual conversation. The model embraced here is “if it looks good, as a facsimile, it’s probably good enough.” What a loss for all of those who have spent a lifetime in a craft perfecting real things. Serif, proportion, texture, text— all made visible through touch. One tug of a rope, one breath of wind, and this whole image redesigns itself. With photographic art I can make images without ever smearing paint or lifting out. I touch with my eyes and mind. What makes it human is metaphor. What keeps you tethered to this world, and to others?
Work in progress: Seattle icons of place and archi Work in progress: Seattle icons of place and architecture. This piece harkens to another time. Old world rotogravure, lithography, the specimen studies of explorers first seeing the tropics, or the to-them “new world.” Also to the early psychedelic history of Seattle, where if your UW professor was missing in class he might be sitting in one of the mythic cedars at Volunteer Park, or cactus gazing in the steamy other-world of the conservatory. It was a magical time, and the park was the incandescent center. 

The way I work is by deconstructing the real into many subtle layers of color and tint and tone, and then recomposing as though each piece of photographic information was a plate. In my architectural images and botanical work a piece like this can go back-and-forth for a long time between realism and atmosphere and I never know until the very last step exactly where it will land.
Best way to contemplate landscape and travel is by Best way to contemplate landscape and travel is by candlelight.
Study of place, Volunteer Park Conservatory. I sta Study of place, Volunteer Park Conservatory. I start my morning pages with barely formed questions: 

What is a dream? Is a glass house safe or waiting to be broken? What is the effect of layering and repetition, a note repeated more and more softly without elaboration?

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