Artist's Statement
Zen is a multifaceted spiritual tradition that offers a simpler yet more profound way of life and a unique way of seeing. While the way of life can involve a very deep and lengthy exploration, we believe that the vision pointed to has great relevance to the discipline of photography. We are certainly not the first to recognize this fact. We simply want to add our voices to those of others who see the great promise for artists that is held in this great eastern wisdom tradition. Zen insights have never been more relevant than they are today. We live in an increasingly complex and fast paced society. Our days are spent largely in mind games, jumping frenetically back and forth between the past and the future. We live in the abstract and seek meaning in the exotic and remote. Lost in what has been called the "consensus trance" of modern society, we are blinded to the magic and wonder of the everyday landscape of our being.

Artists living and creating in this environment must always struggle to see with fresh eyes. Raised from infancy on the accepted and "normal" ways to interpret their surroundings, the reality they perceive is for the most part secondhand, mediated by a thick overlay of language. Conventional wisdom is the "fast food" of the mind, streamlined, efficient and readily understood by all. It is also the enemy of original vision. In photography, it contributes to work that is, at best, fashionable and at worst, trite and cliché. Zen can provide a new direction. While all aspects of Zen are not specifically relevant to photography, we believe that the following are photographically essential insights.

Focus on the Moment
According to Zen, the only life we have is that which is found in the present. Everything else is memory or anticipation. We must be awake to really live. That is what the word Buddha means - one who is awake. Mindfulness is a technique that is employed in Zen to encourage waking up to the present. It is not easily mastered, and can take years to develop, but it is extraordinarily important and fulfilling. It is also highly effective for photography. To be truly sensitive to the unique visual offerings of the moment, we must not be lost in abstractions, expectations, objectives or deadlines. If our minds are quiet and not preoccupied with agendas, we will be able to respond to the intuitive and spontaneous reactions of our being as it responds to the beauty and wonder of life. Those advanced in Zen believe that the best work has the quality of an accident. Careful planning and manipulation play little role in the Zen production of art, though prior training in technique has its place. It is believed that we must go with our feelings more than our thoughts, and tap a deeper and more genuine level of ourselves at the moment of creation. Only after the fact, when assessing the pictures earlier taken should reason and judgment play a significant role.

The Unselfconscious Process
One of the most confusing and paradoxical aspects of Zen is its view of the self. Zen says we aren't who we think we are. While we are seen to exist in the relative sense, in terms of the absolute, the dance and the dancer are considered to be one. Many spiritual traditions have seen similar truths, and claim that by losing one's life, life is indeed gained. By emptying we become full. While no doubt confusing for the novice, its implication for the photographer would be to forget oneself, as much as possible, when taking pictures. This, in fact, is a very common experience among musicians and painters, who often report "losing themselves" in their art. In a sense, the picture takes itself. In the words of Henri Cartier-Bresson, "you have to blend in like a fish in water, you have to forget yourself." The artist becomes the process of creation. When something bigger than the persona takes charge, when Life itself is given free reign unhampered by our premeditated ideas of what should happen, the resultant pictures can be quite remarkable.

The Magic of the Ordinary
Zen promotes the rediscovery of the obvious, which is so often lost in its familiarity and simplicity. It sees the miraculous in the common and magic in our everyday surroundings. When we are not rushed, and our minds are unclouded by conceptualizations, a veil will sometimes drop, introducing the viewer to a world unseen since childhood. There was a time, when, as children we inhabited a timeless world unmediated by the canned perceptions with which we were later inculcated. Picasso once said that it took him four years to paint like Raphael, but it took him a lifetime to paint like a child. To see things in their original beauty, we must crack the shell of preconceptions with which adults are saddled. Zen has little to do with ideas, and its masters consistently point to the concrete. We are surrounded by magic. We literally have to go nowhere.

Quieting the Mind
The content of our lives, to a large degree, begins and ends with language, even our understanding of self. Our days are punctuated, from start to finish, with a continuing blitz of verbal noise. Radios, pagers, email, billboards, and television are only a few of the sources of the conceptual torrent that numbs the mind and the senses. To exist and be recognized, and to ensure speed and efficiency in a society that worships economic productivity, things must be labeled, categorized, defined and pigeonholed. We, therefore, see through a thick screen of concepts and abstractions. We see labels and numbers, convenient units of perception, rather than actual reality. As Jung said, no concept is a carrier of life. We are crippled by habits of the mind, preconceptions reinforced endlessly by others blinded in the same ways. Such conceptualization is one-dimensional and blinds us to the uniqueness and idiosyncrasies of every concrete object. We live with blinders on. As we sow, so we reap. We see what we expect to see, what we have been taught to see. As photographers, we must focus on the details of life and bypass the generalities. There is a saying in Zen: examine the living words and not the dead ones. We must open a direct line to reality, unclouded by the dust of the past - see Eden before the expulsion. Our challenge is to see the living fact - to become intimate with life.