The Art of Photographing Nothing
Abstracting the abstract
Early in my practice of photography — I’m 65 now and have been making photographs for at least 50 years — I found joy in the abstract. Not everyone appreciates looking at something mundane in a way that makes it seem unusual, but I got a kick out of it. In fact, I liked to make pictures of things in a way that made it hard to determine exactly what it was a photo of.
I didn’t do this to trick people. It was my way of finding beauty or mystery (hopefully both) in the abstract.
It wasn’t until 2007 when I participated in a photography workshop in Santa Fe (Zen and the Art of Photography, led by Doug Beasley), that I found a good name for this genre. One of our first assignments in the workshop was to go out and make photographs of “nothing.”
By nothing, Doug meant that we were to make images that were pleasing or compelling to look at, but of ambiguous content.
The title photo above was one I made that day in Santa Fe — it met with an audible gasp from the other workshop members and was voted the best photograph of nothing they had ever seen.
For me, given my decades of enjoyment of abstracting the abstract, the assignment was a walk in the park. We had to make three photos of nothing and each of mine engaged and stumped…
