Finding Mindfulness in Photography

Robyn Yzelman

Aug 27

By Robyn Yzelman

For many years I was inseparable from my camera. It hung around my neck wherever I went, a bulky thing larger than my face and my two hands. I was obsessed with photographing everything around me, finding art and beauty in the everyday: my classmates, friends, every landscape I saw, putting off studying to line up in the front row of music festivals. I was developing my own aesthetic taste, doing the requisite 10,000 hours it supposedly takes to be good at something. I lived for the times I would occasionally land the elusive perfect shot: light, composition and angles coming together with a satisfying click of the shutter.

But this passion was fueled by an undercurrent of anxiety. Around others, I liked that holding a camera immediately elevated me to the role of photographer, not just regular partygoer or stranger. I could put aside my normally fearless and extroverted persona, which I sometimes found exhausting, and retreat behind my lens. Blending into the background gave me the opportunity to step into the role of observer; I relished no longer having to make small talk or interact with others.

This changed when I met Jean, a talented Haitian cellist, in the shade of a conservatory once razed to the ground in an earthquake. I hid behind my camera as I usually did, thinking that if I took his portrait I would be relieved of coming up with something to say. But he pressed on, and in between my limited grasp of Creole/French and fumbled gesturing we figured out an unlikely shared language: Chinese. We burst out laughing at the absurdity of the coincidence -- two strangers who could not have been more different, speaking Chinese in Haiti of all places. Meeting Jean reminded me of the precious connections I had let slip away as a photographer, that a camera should be a means for human connection, not replace it altogether.

Hiking up rural mountain paths elsewhere in Haiti, I passed villagers who gestured for me to take their portrait. I was humbled to oblige. They held their expressions regally, proud and defiant of the camera’s gaze. They would never see the finished photographs but I think they knew, as I did, that beauty deserves to be captured and remembered: their carefully pressed Sunday church dress and the sweeping mountain views around them. Maybe they wanted to stake their rightful claim over a world that trafficked in images of their suffering. For them, to be photographed is to be respected.

This harkened back to a time when photography was not as commonplace or a commodity, and one had to be of a certain status to have their portrait taken. In asking to be photographed, they demanded respect from me, as photographer, interloper, viewer.

Looking through my many rolls of film and hard drives of images taken over fifteen years, I realize that I made some of my most artistically beautiful photos during a particularly unhappy and painful time in my life. Maybe it was the curse of trying to be an artist, with art thriving on sadness. But in those photos, the light and shadows bloom perpetually and unnaturally golden. There are mountains, cherry blossoms, the wing of a scapula, the curved bow of a loved one’s lips. I see clearly how I sought refuge and distraction in beauty in order to avoid facing up to uglier realities. While my photos were technically not a lie, I could still see how I selectively left out many things, carefully constructing the fantasy I desperately wanted to live in. In this lay the irony: the only way I could get there was to face up to it and leave.

In some of my photos, I also see fear reflected back at me. I was afraid of many things: change, growth, my natural forgetfulness, the passing of time, being left behind. I photographed relentlessly as a way to freeze time so I could hold on to everything and everyone around me. But several years ago I started seriously cultivating yoga and zen meditation practices that allowed me to be grounded in the present as I am. These mindfulness practices emphasized acceptance and nonattachment: one of my favorite lessons is that we are the sky, and our moods or thoughts, however stormy they may be, are simply passing weather. The way I photographed, I was the sky frantically reaching to hold each and every cloud in my hands -- an impossible and unsustainable proposition. This is a fundamental tension at the heart of photography or other forms of art. To capture, paint or write about something is to continue living in a moment that doesn’t exist anymore, whereas I wanted to be more fully in the here and now.

Slowly I started to put my camera away, taking trips without it even as photography became more embedded in our everyday lives and as we grew accustomed to snapping instant selfies or photos of our food, consuming image after image endlessly scrolling on our phones. These days, I rarely photograph and no longer care as much about preserving a memory. I am more content to live life and experience it in the present, to embrace my old fears and lean into the natural passage of time. I satisfy any artistic urges by still keeping a roll of film in a simple point and shoot camera older than I am, where I never know if a shot is going to be in focus or optimally lit.

Unlike with digital photos or more advanced film cameras, I surrender control and precision so that every frame is essentially an experiment. The unpredictability of knowing how a photo will turn out until I develop it is for me, the perfect exercise in being here now, and letting go of expectations of the future. This way, photography gets to keep some of its magic.

Robyn Yzelman is a Singapore-born, St. Louis-based writer and anthropologist working in the Bolivian Amazon.

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