PHOTOGRAPHY AS A GIFT

BY RUTH BERGEN BRAUN

LANGUAGE SHAPES OUR WORLD, our craft, and our experience. Photographers often describe their process by using surprisingly predatory and aggressive terms. We shoot. We go on shoots. We take shots. We hunt for subjects. We review our images to see what we captured.

Contemplative photography, particularly as described by Howard Zehr in The Little Book of Contemplative Photography, uses different language. The author approaches photography as a collaborative experience. An image is received and we, the photographers, are the beneficiaries. A contemplative photographer invites and receives.

Relationships may be similar. My relationship with Ryan was not pursued but given. Ryan has Down Syndrome. I had supported people with disabilities before and was open to doing so again. Then we met and, through a series of conversations, I became his photography coach/mentor. Our relationship is a gift.

To some, Ryan has a disability. To me, he has different abilities. He approaches life with his eyes wide open. He sees details that I miss. Our time together takes us to different places to explore various genres of photography. Portraits, street photography, landscapes, cityscapes, buildings, action, events, and more.

We experiment with settings and perspectives. Our focus is not to capture but to enjoy our experience together and invite images to materialize, as gifts.

In her book Braiding Sweetgrass, Robin Wall Kimmerer explores the concept of the gift economy. The essence of a gift is reciprocity. A gift gives back, gives forward. A gift creates a set of relationships. As Ryan and I share the images given to us, we create relationships with those who view them. Now, after a few months, others are giving us gifts: ideas of who and where to photograph. Ryan doesn’t read and thus did not initially understand the impact of this image until it was interpreted for him later. Our exploration that day was simply street photography in downtown Calgary. What is this particular image’s gift? Could this image be a gift to those in power in our city in that it illuminates what mere words cannot?

What changes in us when we see our photographs not as something we have created out of our sheer skill and brilliance but as a random act of kindness from the world, from our space, to us? What changes in us when we approach our craft and our lives with open hands that receive rather than capture? What changes when we allow those with different abilities to give us their gifts? While there are no definitive answers, I’m contented to keep posing these questions to more photographers and photography appreciators as my own way of paying it forward.