Damn: Photos of monks meditating

Yesterday I had this very idea.  A few hours later - bam! - there it was in my FB news feed.

The Still Point

Capturing the movement of the mind

In his latest work, Junsik Shin, a recent photography graduate of New York City’s Parsons School of Design, takes his camera into the Zen temples of America and his native Korea. In his most recent project, entitled “Ee Mut Ko?” (“What Is This?”), his eye follows not the ornate interior artwork or the sweeping curves of the temple architecture, but the monks themselves, absorbed in meditation. It is both an utterly familiar subject and an unexpectedly fascinating one, for who would have thought that the thing itself, sitting meditation, could be so visually arresting?

Borrowing Ideas

Back from summer holidays and it's time now to get everything into shape for assessment submission. In the meantime, I thought I'd note a couple of ideas worth borrowing.

The first is from Michael Rubin, who used a wall as his subject, shooting everything that passed in front of it in the course of some hours.  I could easily do the same in my neighborhood with a wall, a corner, a train station, or some other suitable landmark.  I'll be keeping an eye out for location on my future forays.

The second is from Jacob Aue Sobol, a Magnum photographer whose latest project is built around the idea of taking massive number of thematically related images within a short time.  Sobol did a 30-day ride on the Trans Siberian railway, shooting 1000 images a day.  His girlfriend filmmaker did the initial selection of 100 images per day while riding the train. Together they winnowed this selection to 20, leaving them 1200 images on arrival in Beijing, from which they made a final cut of 60.

I'm thinking I could do something similar here, driving across the UAE, say all seven Emirates in 10 days. What I would need is a driver, as doing both might be a bit too much.  I could edit in the car or at camp sites, and have a presentation ready on arrival on Day 10.  

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Photography Prohibited

Manjushri (Enryakuji)

Yesterday I visited Kyoto’s Toji, The East Temple.  It’s been on my to-visit list since completing my pilgrimage of Shikoku several years ago.  With a couple of exceptions, the 88 temples along the 1200km route belong to Japan’s Shingon school of Buddhism, a Tantric school established in the 9th century by Kukai.  Toji was the master's base in Kyoto and the first Tantric temple in the capital.  Toji is also unique for housing a large collection of rare sculpture and paintings, much of it brought by Kukai from China.