Friends,
Nirlep forwarded his brother's thoughts on CNP as a regular guest visitor of CNP !! I enjoyed reading this. Hope you all will too !!
Thank you Dr Harpreet !
- Regards,
Ganesh.
Creative Nature Photography - An outsider’s perspective
By Dr. Harpreet Singh Rai
A conscious act of creation involves experiencing something with heightened awareness, and crystallizing the experience into a form that tends to stimulate a similarly intense experience. To that effect both the creator and the act of creation are transitory in nature. They get created afresh with every new act of creation. It is this disconnect with the previous acts of creation that allows the creator to re-experience his own acts as an outsider.
Once manifested, an art form lends itself to the observer both as an experience as a well a perception. While experience is what pulls the consciousness to the moment and merges the observer and observed, perception is what gets bounced off the phenomenon to the observer. Strength of an art form normally hinges on the proportion of experience and perception that it inspires in the observer. With its content skewed towards the former, an art form is more likely to have a more lasting and stronger impact on the observer. The visual arts inherently suffer from a bias towards perception. Abstraction in visual arts is primarily inspired by an effort to compensate this bias. This perceptional bias is not by design but by virtue of the fact that of all our senses, the sight potentially forms the strongest element of our perception and therefore the most overused and desensitized. It is what gives shape to the “mundane reality”. Every other sense is more abstract than sight and hence more prone to stimulating experience than perception. It is not a coincidence that music has been the most enduring, widely understood and spiritual art form through the eons. Free of context, it transcends cultural barriers and flows through the ages.
Having said that, photography is a unique art that while being rich in experience also turns its inherent perceptional bias to suit its own purpose. It is probably the only art form that works equally well in both modes .i.e. of experience and perception. Operating in the “experience mode”, it captures and brings out the intensity of the visual experiences through images that pierce the blunted visual sensibility and re-create the raw experience in its pristine, pre-perception brilliance. On the creator’s part, this requires both a throbbing visual sensibility and the craft to translate the experience into the image.
The other, equally interesting and creative mode of operation can be likened to visually enhanced poetry. In this mode, an image slowly works up a perception-storm in the observer, gradually possesses the observer’s mind and finally sends it into a “koan-ish” tizzy. The image is tantalizingly close to the observer’s grasp and yet never quite there. This is what keeps the image alive and imbues it with permanence as an art form.
As an outsider, I think CNP consciously or unconsciously embraces and nurtures both these precepts. The quality of commentaries on the images that manifest these precepts is a testimony to that. As for the text accompanying some of the images, it is best used only as a subtle and unobtrusive trigger to initiate the experience and/or perception. Anything that rids the image of its subtlety not only undermines the essence of photography as an art but also reveals the poverty of experience or perception in the creation. To that effect, depth of experience and perception are indispensable for creating an artful image. As long as photography originates out of a keen sense of presence and vibrant “seeing”, it can be an uplifting and inspiring experience. Standing on the fringes and watching this happen on the CNP, I can vouch for that!