It takes a lot of imagination to be a good photographer. You need less imagination to be a painter, because you can invent things. But in photography everything is so ordinary; it takes a lot of looking before you learn to see the ordinary.
David Bailey, in Face, December 1984.
I call the feast day of Epiphany 'the photographer’s feast day’ as an intentional way of marking, at least once in the year, the gift of the technology that allows me to play with ways of seeing, giving thanks for the very gift of eyes by which I see such amazing things, people, places. I celebrate Epiphany not just as a day, but as a season, a season to revel in the delight of the sheer wondrous fact of revelation: God’s continual breaking into my world.
Yet this year in particular I am being reminded that I need to learn anew the revelation that ‘God is the details’ (which came to me after a big health collapse in 2003, led me to pick up a camera again, and find a pathway through deep depression). My Advent journey of ‘pondering treasure’ has heightened my need to learn to see again, and without a camera in my hand.
I am being reminded of the spiritual challenge to put on a ‘beginner’s mind’, every day, day in and day out. In In God’s Holy Light, Joan Chittister defines the ‘beginner’s mind’ as a being in a state of “perpetual alertness”. Am I curious to know what my Creator is going to do in my life today? Am I awake to the possibility that I may see God in a totally foreign way, a way which turns upside down all my preconceptions of what and who God is?
It is hard to remain alert when chronic health problems debilitate and exhaust me. So today I remind myself that even if ‘a daily act of seeing’ through a camera lens is not possible, and light sensitivities prevent me from looking out the window, then if all else fails, I might still practice Visio Divina using photographs I have received over the past year, the past decade. Reflecting on these images allows me to come at seeing God at home in my details from a sideways perspective - that perspective my God delights in - which pierces all my blind spots.
This is my small reflection on today’s image:
In your cracks, your weathered faces,
In your lightnesses, in your shadows,
In your soft growth, in your rough patches,
In your worn layers, in your seeping juices,
In your shelter, in your strength,
In your blues, your hues of hurt,
still you stand
tall.
I am struck by the otherness of things rather than their sameness.
The way a tiny pile of snow perches in the crook of a branch in the
tall pine, away by itself, high enough not to be noticed by people,
out of reach of stray dogs. It leans against the scaly pine bark, busy
at some existence that does not need me.
It is the differences of objects that I love, that lift me toward the rest
of the universe, that amaze me. That each thing on earth has its own
soul, its own life, that each tree, each clod is filled with the mud of
its own star. I watch where I step and see that the fallen leaf, old
broken grass, an icy stone are placed in exactly the right spot on the
earth, carefully, royalty in their own country.
‘Looking for the Differences’
Tom Hennen
epiphany of the ordinary (2019). iPhone image.
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