LINDSAY DONALD THE PHOTOGRAPHER

For twenty years I had been photographing contentedly. The world was a calendar: Sunset after sunset. But slowly and subtly ‘the calendar view’ of the reality, was being cut and I began to experience a quality of struggle between my clarified sense of perception and my old learned photographic responses to the outside world.

I somehow slowed down and began to sit quietly on my own and saw that I had to join the practice of meditating with the technical knowledge of photography and not to keep them as separate compartments in my life! I also had to understand that I should trust that first thought, and to go along with it and not to conceptualize too much in my work.

I figured that I did not have to impress an imaginary audience as I was shooting, that way I was able to approach the whole thing simply. In a nutshell, I had to learn to appreciate the ordinariness of the world around me. Someone said to me, that I should learn to sit down and meditate, because meditation slows down the basic speed and aggressive qualities of the mind and it also allows the senses to operate in a more natural and uncluttered field, which is unbiased by considerations of what I would like or not like to see!

While shooting the bulk of this work, I was noticing that I was being caught in a mind trap. I was not shooting what I saw. In the first instant, a fresh perception would occupy my thoughts and immediately, I would get another flash of inspiration of how I would have like to shoot the same subject. I would inevitably lose the first fresh idea, and photograph along a predictable conditioned response. This split between my first and second thought became extremely frustrating. I had no way of relating with that frustration.

As my work developed, I began to appreciate that the images I was producing were coming closer to recording things as I was actually seeing them; somehow, the basic qualities of people. From that point of view, I feel that one major obstacle has been removed from my journey as a photographer. I am now able to share my experience of the world with this increasing simplicity.

For any photographer who wishes to express his or her vision of the world as they see it, what they say can be enormously helpful and inspiring for future generations.