today is an open window
too high above the street to look in
low enough to hear the sounds within
too distant to grasp the meaning behind the sounds
close enough to identify the emotions

you can stop and listen
you can keep walking
but you can’t close the window

For 860 straight Thursdays, the eclectic collective of Utata have gone out walking, in cites and small towns and rural countrysides, on sunny days and in the rain and through the snow, in the morning or over lunch or after work, collecting ordinary moments like magpies.

Diners, bean fields, dancers, corner markets, autumn trees, families walking, ponds, libraries, cyclists, finches, pickup trucks, fences, baseball diamonds, ice skaters, stray cats, tidal pools, nuns shopping, broken tree limbs in Sweden, doorways, sailboats, rain, patches of weeds, mallards, shop window reflections, shadows, cheeseburgers, cemeteries, orb spiders, piles of sand, stone barns, clotheslines, stop signs, mannequins, old men reading newspapers on park benches.

Eight hundred and sixty Thursdays. Every single Thursday since April 19, 2006. What will YOU be doing on Thursday? Me, I’ll be walking.

You may be wondering, “What does this self-portrait of a woman with a towel on her head, holding an apple, have to do with ice hockey?” Allow me to explain.

This is part of a Utata Iron Photographer project (not to be confused with any of Utata’s Iron Potato projects).

You may think that fails to answer the question. To which I respond: “I love ice hockey.”

There. Hope that helps.

There’s a gatha that goes…wait. You probably want to know what a gatha is. It’s a Buddhist thing, a verse recited mentally in rhythm with breathing. It’s a part of mindfulness. A big chunk of mindfulness is devoted to the idea that when you do a thing, you do that thing. You pay attention to it as you do it. You avoid distractions that detract from doing that thing properly.

Okay, back to what I was saying. There’s a gatha that goes like this: Washing the dishes is like bathing the Buddha.

Now, I’ll admit right up front, washing dishes isn’t anything like bathing the Buddha. But it’s a reminder to give the dishes your attention, to take your time, to wash them carefully and thoroughly. Because you’re not just washing dishes, you’re ensuring that whoever eats off that dish later will be eating off a clean dish. It’s an act of caring as much as cleaning.

Another thing. Washing the dishes like you’d bathe the Buddha means you see it as you do it. For a photographer, that also means you’re seeing shapes and colors and movement and momentary shifts in form. And when you see that, you appreciate its beauty.

And then you take a photo of it. (Which, yes, is a distraction–the thing you’re trying to avoid. But hey, even the Buddha admitted this fact: ain’t nobody perfect.)

Every now and then we’re reminded that photography is about light. Where it lands, where it fades, where it shimmers, where it dissipates and separates, where it bends, where it reflects and refracts, where it disappears into shadow.

Robert Frank argued that for photographers, life and light “cannot be a matter of indifference and it is important to see what is invisible to others.” But we have to define ‘what is invisible to others’ to mean what others look at but don’t see.

Do monsters live under the bed? It doesn’t matter. It only matters that photographers will get under the bed to see.

I tried to see the future
by thinking ’bout the past
and asking lots of questions
that I probably shouldn’t ask.

I thought I’d be the party’s life
That’s what the booklet said.
Instead I was the party’s death;
I killed that party dead.

Now the party’s over
My future’s all a-shred.
My fortune’s telling me the past
is what I’ve got instead.

Graffiti on bare brickwork. The floor covering has been ripped out, leaving evidence of walls knocked down. The window is grimy and cobwebbed. Almost everything has been stripped out.

So did the previous occupiers leave in a hurry or was that barrel a deliberately abandoned?

Back in the mid-1970s, there was a movement to ease away from traditional landscape photography. It was born out of a desire to present the modern landscape as it actually existed rather than in an idealized way. They wanted to use the camera to record with precision exactly what was in front of the lens; to view the world with a detached, unemotional, deadpan eye; to reduce the subject of the photograph to an essentially topographic state.

In other words, they wanted to include all the extraneous crap that traditional landscape photographers tried so hard to exclude. The ugly, chaotic, messy, jarring stuff.

But here’s a problem: Humankind has spent something like twelve thousand years unconsciously building the foundation of aesthetics. It’s really difficult to toss all that aside. That’s a lot of human nature to overcome. It’s hard NOT to see beauty.

Because it’s usually there. And Leonid Paulov often finds it.

As Seldon his own self put it:

They planted a wildflower meadow on Sandylands seafront. I wasn’t sure it would survive the salt but it’s magnificent, especially on a dull, dreary day.

There’s something deliciously contradictory about the notion of deliberately planting wildflowers. Wildflowers, by definition, are…well, wild. Not intentionally seeded. But over the last couple of decades, there’s been a movement to encourage flowering local native plants in places where they may have once grown wild.

I’ve no idea if the Sandylands seafront in Morecombe ever in its long history actually had such an array of field poppies, corncockles, bird’s foot trefoil, corn marigolds, knapweed, chamomile, sheep’s sorrel, and viper’s bugloss. And really, who cares? It’s a beautifully romantic idea and no doubt it’s lightened hearts and spirits. Especially, as Seldon says, on a dull, dreary day.

This is what photography does.

You’re walking along, minding your own business, on your way from this place to that place, and then you see something. Some arrangement of line and form, some odd placement of light or shadow, some distinctive shape, some color, some thing. You’re probably the only one to see it. Others may look at it, but you see it. And it draws you in.

So you photograph it. Maybe just for yourself, just for your own delight and pleasure. Maybe so you can show it to others, some of whom might also see it. If they see it too, the delight and pleasure grows. If they don’t—well, it doesn’t matter. You saw it. That’s enough.

This is what photography does. It gives you the power to see.