A few years ago, while visiting the small town of La Conner in the Skagit Valley, I spent some time browsing the gift shop of the small but impressive Museum of Northwest Art. Among the books by and about northwest artists, I found a small paperback book titled Wabi-Sabi with the subtitle for Artists, Designers, Poets & Philosophers. I purchased a copy and read it that afternoon. I’ve read it through many times since, and it will stay in easy reach on my bookshelf for some time to come.
The author, Leonard Koren, has written many titles about Japanese aesthetics and culture for western readers, and this volume makes a noble effort at both explaining and embodying the sensibility of the ideas being put forward. Koren’s deliberate use of photography in this book to establish his theme especially appealed to me. As an amateur photographer, I found myself thinking about my own practice differently after reading this book.
I can’t provide a static definition of wabi-sabi, except to say that it is a commonly understood name for an entire system of thought and perception keyed into the truth that all things are constantly moving into and out of existence. It also suggests that that any given moment in this cycle is an affirmation of the entire existence through which things that are present with us came and out of which they are passing.
The aesthetic expression of this sensibility is usually found in poetry, one of the most enduring arts of all human cultures. Words are employed by the poet to capture a moment of awareness when the existence of the moment becomes inexorably tied to the magnitude of existence. This is how awe and wonder can be found in close and simple perception of the smallest thing, the most humble object, or the most mundane of circumstances.
I wondered how photography would fare as a tool for expressing the sensibility of wabi-sabi. The images in Koren’s book are a good first step at considering this. Some appear as documents of expressions that exist elsewhere in the world — rustic tea houses, pottery, furniture, and ceremonial rooms. Others are reflections of moments in the author’s travels when he has encountered a scene that grabbed his attention and spoke of a truth about the things that appeared before him — an overgrown corner outside a vacant building, the juxtaposition of five materials used to build the wall of a cafe, a raised and weeping iron nail in a piece of siding on a house.
The photos themselves frame the subject or subjects of attention, some in isolation, some in the context of much larger surroundings. Some photos are sharp (the worn corner of a wooden stool), while others have a shallow depth of field (a hatched and hand-worn carpenter’s plumb).
Found objects, small and large, are unintentional expressions of the aesthetic. Art objects are intentional attempts at touching on the universal truths found in all things. The photos of these objects function alongside the words of the book to communicate about wabi-sabi in some meaningful, useful way (for artists, designers, poets, and philosophers).
But this book raised a larger question for me about photography: Can a photograph itself be an expression of the aesthetic, or is it forever bound to be a document of the expression found in things elsewhere? One might as well ask if a poem is a direct expression of wabi-sabi or simply a record of a passing moment of thought and perception on the part of the poet. Well, which is it?
At the moment, my conclusion is that it is both.
A poet can write a poem and a photographer can capture a photograph in response to being taken by the presence without and the presence within as they mirror, amplify, or collide with each other. A successful poem or photograph can hold and express that moment of awareness to another person, who may in turn respond in the moment of presentation with his or her own experience of a universal truth felt deeply and honestly. This is an expression of wabi-sabi.
A photographer captures and reveals a latent image in a chemical emulsion on film, and then creates prints by projecting that image against sensitized paper, which he then develops in chemical baths. These are physical, temperamental processes that are prone to errors and flaws (dust or hair on negatives, incomplete washing, water spots, etc.) that reveal themselves either immediately or much later.
The objects themselves, prints or negatives, can become subject to wear and tear, the qualities of slowly moving out of their moment of perfect existence. I have a box full of badly handled negatives from my grandfather that are themselves exquisite examples of wabi-sabi. Note that the expression is not deliberate or manipulated — the absolute opposite of the aesthetic — but rather by chance, circumstance, and the unavoidable presence of the all too human inability to capture and hold perfection. In these ways I think photography can be an effective exercise in contemplating this universal aesthetic.
And poetry? Can it be wabi-sabi itself, or is it trapped in a kind of rarefied field of existence as pure document? I think one only has to hear an author or another person read a poem, recite a poem from memory, or share her closest approximation of a poem she heard long ago to be in the presence of wabi-sabi — the crystallized moment of things, ideas, memories, objects, people, and time moving into and out of existence right before our ears and eyes.
In a way, it is not the art object itself but only that moment of perception on the part of another that is the actual form wabi-sabi takes in human experience. Art alone, whether a poem or a photograph, is simply the opportunity.