Beauty Hunting: Photography as Meditation | Antonina Mamzenko
“What is the antidote to the terribleness of the world?
It’s beauty hunting: the key to survival”.
Jen Pastiloff
The start of the global pandemic coincided with a personal crisis coming to a head in my own home. My world was crumbing around me and it felt like I would never be able to take another photograph ever again.
To get out of the house - and out of my own head - I started walking in a local nature reserve.
A “nature reserve” is a big overstatement. Molesey Heath is an old mineral working site tucked behind rows of houses nearby. A piece of abandoned land where nature was allowed to take over; an unkempt expanse of rough grassland, shrub and deep tangles of blackberry bush as far as the eye can see, making you disoriented, every turn of the path looking the same as the other. It’s not pretty by any stretch of imagination and yet it is where I found beauty and peace. I felt certain affinity to it, and kept going back again and again.
I’m not a particularly outdoorsy person, and I would much rather stay inside with a good book or comfort-watching a favourite TV series, but it didn’t take me long to realise that these almost daily walks have soothed my soul and allowed my healing process to finally begin. The monotony of them, trudging the same unremarkable paths over and over again, forced me to notice things I never noticed before, to pay attention, to clear my head.
I took photographs of random things that caught my eye, experimented with different processes, focused on the tiny blades of grass, noticed the birds mid-flight and witnessed how the changing light affected the unremarkable landscape around me. And with that, I rediscovered myself.
This practice - what I now call Beauty Hunting - has become my meditation, my coping mechanism, a way to quiet my mind, and a tool for my ongoing recovery.
Photography and meditation might seem like concepts that couldn’t be further apart, with the former looking outward to the world and the latter looking inward into self. Yet when practiced in a certain way, photography can become a conduit to a mindfulness and meditation practice for those of us who have trouble sitting cross-legged and trying to quiet our scattered and confused thoughts - for people like me.
Here is what almost two years of photographic meditations taught me:
Let go of perfection or any expectation of a particular end result: it’s not about creating an award winning image or even a pretty picture, it’s about the process itself.
Cultivate shoshin - beginner’s mind - by having an attitude of openness, eagerness, and lack of preconceptions about what you’re seeing and photographing.
Don’t judge or analyse. Simply be a silent witness to what’s around you. Don’t think “what a beautiful flower, how can I photograph it in the best possible way?” Instead, simply note: “a flower, I see you”. And click the shutter if you feel like it in that moment.
Let your curiosity and your intuition lead you rather than setting out to photograph a specific thing or a scene. Don’t go looking for the picture. Let the photograph find you.
Slow down and pay attention to what’s around you. Rediscover the ordinary and find beauty in it. It’s not about finding something exciting to photograph, it’s about finding a new way to look at familiar and possibly even boring things around you.
And finally, just keep going: even if you’ve walked this path a hundred times, like I have on Molesey Heath, can you experience it afresh? Can you see something you haven’t seen before? Can you appreciate it for what it is?
Antonina Mamzenko
@mamzenko
www.mamzenko.com
