Have you ever been in a conversation where the other party was obviously thinking up what they were going to say instead of listening to you?  Of course you have.  Far too often.  And it’s not as if we aren’t guilty of the same behavior ourselves.  ‘What I have to say is far more important than what you have to say’ is a prevalent attitude although it is seldom directly voiced.  That wouldn’t be polite. On the other hand, how has it felt when someone has genuinely listened to you?  What was that like?  That was a gift, wasn’t it?

This problem of not listening isn’t restricted to conversations. In an interview, the jazz musician Wynton Marsalis complained about the problem of pulling a small jazz ensemble together.  As you know, in many pieces the musicians in the ensemble will play together and then they will take solos and go back to playing together.  Everybody gets a turn at solo.  The problem Marsalis saw was that while one musician was playing solo the others would be off somewhere else in their heads, working their own agendas,  maybe getting ready for their own solos.  It isn’t really an ensemble when that happens.  This, after all, is jazz and the performance is not going to be exactly the same from one day to the next.  It’s a different day, the people are different and the music will be different.  Listening to the other members of the ensemble, really listening, will likely affect how one plays.  After all, it is a kind of conversation.

Photography has a lot in common with conversation, although initially it may not appear that way.  We go out, we see something we like, we take a picture.  Wham, bam, thank you ma’am.  When you are actively listening to someone, really listening, you put your own agenda aside.  Over a period, an agenda, a theme, does develop in the conversation but it very likely isn’t the one you might have predicted – the other individual is contributing to the conversation too.  If you are both listening to one another, really listening, a sense of oneness might develop.  You are each reflecting something about the other individual.

When going out to shoot, even if it is for a specific assignment, why not relax the reins of the going-in-agenda, if you have one, and let the scene communicate with you.  Minor White captured it in this quote:

‘Be still with yourself.  Let the subject generate its own composition.  When the photograph is a mirror of the man, and the man is a mirror of the world, then Spirit might take over.’

Losing one’s self means letting the scene speak to you in its fashion.  This isn’t a matter of walking up to the scene and saying ‘Hi, how are you?’  The form of communication is subtle and I doubt that it can be put into words.  There is no doubt this is difficult and it takes practice, lots and lots of practice, just as active listening in a conversation takes practice.  It takes patience.  When out on a shoot, a place to begin might be to just find a subject and spend some time with it, just looking.  I find that the image I might make changes as I look at it more closely.  Frederick Franck, author of ‘The Zen of Seeing/Drawing as Meditation’, urged students in art workshops to spend two hours with the subject and draw it looking only at the subject and not the paper on which they were drawing.  I would suggest just spending time with the subject.  This isn’t always possible what with the light and conditions changing almost constantly but it is a way of ‘letting the subject generate its own composition.’

We can do some preparation for this kind of photography even when we don’t have a camera with us, even when all we are doing is talking with another individual.   I think that active listening is good practice for developing active looking.  In both cases that agenda, that ego statement is relaxed and something larger and more meaningful can take its place.  Better conversations result and, I believe, better photography comes of it when you pick up your camera.