Reflections on mindfulness, photography, and the practice of presence
I often say that photography is my way of being in the world — and that I want to create from within. It sounds right when I say it. But what does it actually mean? This April, I let five photographs try to answer that question.
The Ballet Dancer
The first photograph is a black and white image of a dancer that I shot on my analogue camera. This is a medium that already asks something of us before we even raise the camera. The dancer holds a delicate pose for only a moment before it dissolves. To catch it, I had to be precise. I had to be in the zone.
And I was. I waited for the arm and the leg to align, high in the air, and I pressed the shutter at the right instant. Technically, I was fully present.
But when I look at this photograph now, I feel nothing particular. I performed a task. I recorded a pose. The process was clean, but it was empty. There was no meaning in the making of it.
This is the trap of technical presence: you can be completely focused and completely absent at the same time.
The Portrait at the Opening
A colleague from our photo community – it was the opening night of a group exhibition – she stood in front of her own work, looking slightly down, holding a bouquet of flowers. I snapped it on my phone without much thought, just to document the moment.
When I shared it, she said: This is so beautiful. You captured me exactly as I am.
That moved me and also made me wonder: Can we really capture someone as they are? What I think she meant was something rarer: she looked like herself because she wasn’t performing for the camera. She was simply there, in her own moment, and I happened to be paying attention.
The Woman in the Red Coat
This is the one I keep returning to.
Also at a photography exhibition. There is a large portrait on the wall: A woman’s face rendered in deep red tones. And standing before it, with her back to me, is another woman. She is wearing a red coat.
I shot from the hip. I didn’t look through the viewfinder. I didn’t check if I had the shot. I barely decided to take it – the image simply happened through me.
And when I looked at what I had: the woman gazing at the portrait. The portrait gazing back at her. And the portrait — somehow — gazing back at me.
Three gazes. A loop of looking that wouldn’t close.
I felt moved by it in a way I couldn’t immediately name. And I’ve been sitting with that question since: why this one? What was different here?
I think I have a glimpse of understanding it now. With the ballet dancer, I was the author. I chose the moment and I captured it. But with the woman in the red coat, the image revealed itself to me. I wasn’t standing outside the scene pointing a device at it. The boundary dissolved. I was inside the image as it formed.
The usual story of photography is: photographer sees, photographer captures. This photograph reversed that. Something saw me.
Creating from within has two dimensions. One is to be connected with your inner being. The other is to truly be in the moment – not observing it, but part of it. The photographer and the photograph become one thing.
The Arc at Viktoria-Luise-Platz
A black and white analogue photograph. No people. Just an early morning walk through my neighbourhood — the kind of aimless walking where you have no destination and no agenda, only presence.
I live in what feels like a quiet island in the middle of the city. That morning it was especially still. And at the end of the circular square there is this arc, and something in me simply felt called to it. Not because it was compositionally interesting. Not because the light was right. Because I felt calm, and the arc felt calm, and the two matched.
The Cherry Blossoms
Last year I discovered hanami — the Japanese tradition of gathering beneath flowering trees as the blossoms open. It is not merely about beauty. It is about the willingness to sit with transience. The blossoms are extraordinary precisely because they do not last.
This photograph is a colour image, vivid and unashamed. But taking it raised a question I haven’t stopped thinking about: what would happen if I only photographed trees?
Bruce Lee once said he didn’t fear the man who had practiced ten thousand moves; he feared the man who had practiced one move ten thousand times. I think about this in relation to my photography. I move between people, streets, architecture, nature — and sometimes I feel scattered, a little lost, without a thread.
What would it mean to go deep into one thing? To understand trees so intimately that everything else in my photography shifted because of it?
I don’t have the answer yet. But asking the question already feels like the practice.
