God Is at Eye Level: Photography as a Healing Art, by Jan Phillips, copyright 2000, 150 pages.
Jan Phillips began her photographic career on a motorcycle trip from the east coast to the west coast in the 60’s. Her friend helped her buy a 35mm camera to replace her Instamatic and showed her a few things about it. She bought eight 36 exposure rolls of Kodachrome and took pictures everywhere, the beaches of Florida, the cottonfields of Mississippi, the French Quarter of New Orleans, the “barren foreverness” of Texas, the white sand of New Mexico, and around the rim of the Grand Canyon.
When they were developed, though, they were “a blur of shadows and white lights, fuzzy fingertips, and double exposures.” That week she signed up for an adult education photography class.
And she got better. She has traveled the world as a photographer and writer. She asks permission from every person she photographs, and thereby treasures friendships around the world. Her book contains photographs of many of these people.
Jan Phillips must be using a digital camera now. But in the old darkroom days she loved the mysteries. Did I get the exposure right? What exactly did that face show at the instant when the shutter snapped? What will come up on that film under the red light?
Film is the “negative” of the positive print. All those opposites come together to create masterpieces (occasionally) of light and dark, bright and dim, color and lack of color, grays …
In her book, Jan Phillips strives to draw together opposites into something more than dilemma or paradox. To do so, she must rely on the wisdom of God rather than her own understanding. She does not always succeed, but she never stops trying. And often her pictures do the work that words could never do.
Following are two chapters from the book. The first one, for me, is very emotional. The second one inspires me.
Chapter 6
“Speaking Our Peace”
Find something you like to do. Learn to do it well, and do it in the service of the people. – Karlene Faith
Long before I started photographing, I was moved by images that captured my attention and enhanced my awareness of the world at large. On many a rainy afternoon as a child, lost in the photo essays of Life and National Geographic, I entered the lives of I people around the world, pondering the contrasts between my I life and theirs. In my teenage years, the violent images of the 60s sank into my heart, cutting short my innocence—the march on Selma, the assassinations ofjohn F. Kennedy and Dr. Martin Luther King, the Vietnam War, and the Kent State shootings. Then, as now, I was impresÂsionable—moved by what I saw, changed by what I experienced, led to action by what I believed.
Most of us, at some point, have a desire to make a difference in the world. We want our lives to matter, our words to be of use. Photographers and others whose medium is images want the images we put out into the world to speak eloquently about what matters to us, to be the ambassadors of who we are, what we believe in, and what we stand for.
The roll call of photographers who lived by this principle is long and illustrious. Dorothea Lange left a successful studio photography business to work as a documentarian. Her images altered the pubHc’s consciousness about the plight of migrant workers. Life magazine photographer W. Eugene Smith understood the power of a well-structured picÂture story and created compelling photo essays on issues he felt strongly about, such as the industrial pollution at Minamata, Japan. Documentarian Walker Evans was committed to making photographs of tenant farmers that would inform and inspire people to action. Lewis Hine, in his crusade against child labor, created images that did what dry statistics and lengthy speeches never could. Photojournalist and humanist Robert Capa despised war and photographed five of them in an attempt to record its horror and monstrous stupidity, believing that “the truth is the best picture, the best propaganda.”
Having seen the work of these great image-makers and activists and reading about the national response and social reforms their pictures generated, I understood the power that photographs could have on a level beyond the personal. I saw that images could help shape a national consciousness, creating an awareness that could lead to enlightenment, action, change.
Buoyed with this knowledge and faith, in the mid-80s, during the massive global buildup of nuclear weapons, I embarked on a peace pilgrimage around the world. Armed with two hundred rolls of film and a slideshow about the American peace movement, I set out to use my photographs in the service of the people, to share with as many folks as I could images of an active commitment to peacemaking, harmony, and a safe home for all the world’s children.
To create a culture that reflects a reverence for life, we need stories and symbols that heal and guide, that help us remember we are part of a whole. It’s hard, in a society bent on power and profit, to remember what life is really for. Harder still to connect with one another when most things serve to keep us separate. But stories help. Pictures help. And every contact with a lover of life brings us one step closer to loving our own. My journey was a search for those images and stories, an attempt to discover and reveal our oneness around the globe.
In Japan, I was invited to speak to a group of A-bomb survivors at the Nagasaki Association for the Promotion of Peace and to present my slideshow, Focus on Peace. Before my presentation, the program called for us to watch the premiere of a Japanese film that included recently released American military footage of the Nagasaki bombing.
I sat in the back of the room with Mr. Matsunaga, director of the organization, who served as my translator. The lights dimmed, and the film began with a slow pan of the Nagasaki Peace Park. Paper cranes and colorful flowers filled the frame. Then a jump cut took us to the cockpit of an American warplane on August 9, 1945.
We watched the bomb drop. Watched the deadly cloud devour the city. And then from the ground we watched what followed. Mr. Matsunaga, his calm voice silenced, collapsed into tears by my side. The survivors in front of us sat still as sculptures. Frozen in time, they stared ahead, some gasping as they saw images of themselves on the screen, stumbling through the rubble of charred corpses. Dazed and burned, survivors were calling for families they would never find. Quiet sobs filled the room as we witnessed the rerun of a nuclear holocaust.
When it was over, no one moved. No one turned on a light. We sat there in the dark amidst sobs and tears. When the lights came on, and I was introduced, I stood before them and started to cry. It was only at their urging that I could carry on.
I began to speak slowly about the slides we were going to see, with Mr. Matsunaga at my side translating. Then the lights went out again, the music started, and images of millions of people working for peace began to dissolve into each other. There were no words spoken in the slideshow, just the pictures and voices from the International ChilÂdren’s Choir singing “Let There Be Peace on Earth.” The images of colorful, festive, life-affirming demonstrations had more power that day than any I remember. Symbols of a solemn commitment to peace washed over and comforted us. They delivered us, if only momentarily, from the fear that a nuclear holocaust might happen again, for how could these millions marching and chanting and praying for world peace not make a difference?
After the slideshow, the survivors came to the microphone one by one to speak of the profound impact the peace photographs had had on them: “I did not know so many people cared about what happened to us.” “We thought we were all alone in our struggle.” “Seeing that so many Americans care about peace encourages my efforts.” “How can we fail if there are so many of us?”
I had been so immersed in the peace movement during those years that, until that day, it had not occurred to me that others around the world-weren’t even aware that there was an American peace movement doggedly resisting the production and proliferation of nuclear weapons. Finding out made a difference to these Japanese people, seeing those picÂtures, witnessing others in solidarity with them who were working as hard as they were for the same cause.
Those eighty images, one after another, blended with that music, had an impact, told a story that bolstered their courage, honored their experience. What had happened to them did matter after all, and these photographs were evidence of how much. Nothing in the world could heal their physical wounds, their irradiated organs, their burned and disÂfigured faces and limbs, but a healing did occur m their spirits that day, passed on through ; these portraits of comrades in action.
We can and do inspire each other in this life. If a photograph does nothing more than inspire one person to feel that somehow his life mattered, her pain served a purpose, then that one photograph must not go unseen. We can never know the reach of our work, never know when we share a photograph how and why it might make a difference, never know how our small image might help clarify the whole global picture.
But what we do know, from our own experience and the experience of history, is that photographs can change the course of things, turn one’s head, alter one’s thoughts, enlighten one’s darkness. To shoot with that awareness, to know our images, made of light, can contribute light—that is the true joy of photography.
For Your Reflection: Sort through your body of work, and see if any underlying themes surface. What things do you tend to focus on when you photograph? What do your images say about what’s going on in the world these days? About what’s going on in you? Could a stranger look at your work and discover something about who you are, what you care about?
If you were to have a photo essay published in Life magazine and the entire project would be funded so you could go anywhere and shoot anything you wanted, what would be the subject of your story?
(The following quotations are in sidebars along each page of the chapter. And, of course, there are photographs. But you have to get the book to see the pictures. J)
Photography was conceived as a mirror of the universal elements and emotions of the everydayness of life . . . a mirror of the essential oneness of mankind. — Edward Steichen http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edward_Steichen
We receive the light, then we impart it. Thus we repair the world. — Kabbalah
Where there is no vision, the people perish. – Proverbs 29:18
We will take photography in a life-moving direction when we photograph what we know and feel, when we image our own lives, when we publish the images that are ours. Seeing ourÂselves doing things we never imagined possible, we will begin to do them. — Ruth Mountaingrove
Art does not in fact prove anything. What it does is record one of those brief times, such as we each have and then forget, when we are allowed to understand that the Creation is whole. — Robert Adams
If our work is to carry force and meanÂing to our view we must be willing to go all out. — Dorothea Lange (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dorothea_Lange)
 When the eyes see what they have never seen before, the heart feels what it has never felt. – Gracian http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baltasar_Graci%C3%A1n
I shall light a candle of understandÂing in thine heart, which shall not be put out. — II Esdras 14:25
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Chapter 16 (the last chapter)
“Photo-Synthesis: Life from Light”
If you wonder how to find passion in your life, look to see where you are needed, and go there joyfully, full of fire and loving-kindness. Focus your eye on every detail, every expression, every movement, and do not look away until you have seen the Divine. This is the vision, the awareness that will heal our wounds, repair our brokenness, and safeguard this world for those to come.
This, and nothing less.            — Jan Phillips
These are amazing and perplexing times we live in, full of wonder and contradiction. Creativity is rampant, as is violence and destruction. While scientific discoveries are enabling us to create and prolong life, technological advances are giving us the means to destroy it with increasing precision and magnitude. Though people around the world are linked through sophisticated comÂmunications technology, our cities are overflowing with lost souls, homeless and isolated. Some of us are struggling to find meaning in our lives, but even more are struggling simply to stay alive.
Henri Bergson, in The Two Sources of Morality and Religion, writes of humanity laborÂing under the weight of its own inventions. It is as if we have grown too far ahead of ourselves, added to the body but not the soul, so that the extension of our physical capaÂbilities is out of proportion to the refinement of our spirit. “Now, in this excessively enlarged body,” he writes, “the spirit remains what it was, too small now to fill it, too feeble to direct it. . . . Let us add that this increased body awaits a supplement of the soul and that the mechanism demands a mysticism.”
To me, mysticism implies a heightened awareness of our oneness with all life, human and divine. Without this consciousness guiding us, grounding us, we abuse the technology we have so brilliantly conceived and constructed. Mysticism is demanded because we are poised on the perilous edge, at the brink where our choices will determine not what the future will bring, but whether there will be a future.
Teilhard de Chardin wrote that “humanity is being taken to the place where it will have to choose between suicide and adoration.” The only light powerful enough to guide us as we make this choice is enlightenment, a supplement to the soul, the mysticism to which Bergson refers. If we do not come to terms with our own divinity and the divinity of others, our choice will be informed not by reverence and adoration but by illusion and self-interest.
Each of us is contributing daily to the creation of our common future, for better or worse, through our images, words, actions, and works. The more awareness we bring to the task, the more useful, the more compelling are our creations. The capacity to reach the highest states of awareness through contemplation, compassion, and grace is not limited to clerics, sages, saints. Any one of us can embark on that journey, find divinity in every detail, work at dissolving dualities and experiencing oneness in our own minds and lives.
As creators, photographers, visionaries, we are contributing images to the collective consciousness. The images we put out into the world inform those who see them. They carry weight. They add light, or not. They can expand the circle of human compassion, illustrate our relatedness, raise our global consciousness. And as our consciousness changes, so, too, do our relationships, our actions and inÂteractions.
Once when I was producing an annual report for a nonprofit agency, I had to get photographs at the company’s three worksites. Since I wasn’t sure of the locations, I was provided with a driver, a young woman who worked as a janitor at one of the sites. It was a blizzardy day, traffic was slow, and we spent about an hour together in the car driving around.
I didn’t know anything about this young woman, so I started asking questions about her life, what she was interested in, what she liked about her job, if she had a family. Somehow, she ended up sharing a great deal about herself, about her father’s alcoholism, her abuse as a child, her husband’s violence, her fears for her kids, her determination to set out on her own and make a better life for herself and her children.
All I did was listen as the snow swirled and blew around us. After I had gotten my photographs, she dropped me off back where we started. But something big had happened between us, a bond was forged out of her telling and my listening, and from then on, whenever we saw each other, that bond was the first thing that came to mind. Our interactions were never the same after that talk. They had a new quality, an intimacy, an understanding, some kind of trust. We each could have asked anything of the other, it seemed, because we had gone such a distance together already.
Our relationships with people are vital and constantly changÂing. The more we give, the more we receive. The more we seek, the more we find. Finding God at eye level takes little more than attenÂtion, intention, and commitment. It requires that we give up our illusion of separateness and see ourselves in those refugees across the world, in those homeless men and women in the park down the street, in a young woman doing her best in a hard and scary life. It means giving up what we’ve learned about God being in charge and becoming healers ourselves, healing with our images, our words, our listening. It means staying faithful in the face of darkness, knowing that God is unfolding before us in every moment, in every story that someone shares.
Photographer Robert Adams asserted that art can help us make sense of all that is wonderful and all that is terrible about the world we inhabit. “Art,” he writes, “is a discovery of harmony, a vision of disparities reconciled, of shape beneath confusion.” Photographer and critic Tee Corinne speaks about art luring us beyond the confusion of opposites into a vision of the wholeness we seek: “The images we see, as a culture, help define and expand our dreams, our perceptions of what is possible. Pictures of who we are help us visualize who ‘we can be.” Alfred Stieglitz put it all more simply: “Art is the affirmation of life.”
The photographs we make can be food for the soul, nourishing sustenance for the arduous and confusing journey we’re on. We are all hungry for meaning, all on a quest to realize our worth, actualize our potential, manifest whatever is unique to us.
None of us is aiming for triteness, pursuing the shallow. It’s greatness we’re after— and not some hollow applause coming from somewhere beyond us, but the deep-down thrill of knowing we went all out, put our soul into the thing, created something that turned someone’s head, sparked new growth. We want our fire to show, to flare up and light the piece of night that someone’s shivering into. We want our work to be hot, to burn with reality and honesty, to ignite ideas and kindness and passion, to spread hope like wildfire through this darkness.
We’re a culture in big trouble, making big mistakes, and everyone knows it. Just look at the ads, the meaningless sitcoms, the violence in every media format that exists. We need help, and it’s the artists who must deliver it, because it’s the soul that needs rescuing, buoying up, and that’s where art goes. That’s where it performs its magic, does it healing.
Creative work is not self-indulgent. It is not foolhardy. It is not pointless or trivial. It is crucial to our own healing and the healing of the planet. We each have a vision that no one else has, a way of seeing that is rooted in the particularity of our fives. I do not know what you know, cannot see what you see, unless you reveal that to me through your words, your images, your reflections. Your life is a poem that the rest of us are waiting to hear, learn from, integrate into our own.
We photographers are poets in the lanÂguage of symbols. We crystallize experience, reflect the essence of a moment, convey raw and honest emotion with contrast instead of cadence, composition instead of rhyme, light and shadow instead of words. “The creÂative process itself-—with its beauty and elegance, but also its pain and destructibility—is our primary, tangible source for experiencing the divine energy,” writes Diarmuid O’Murchu. This act of witnessing, recording the magnificent strivings and failings of humanity, this commitment to looking, to seeing into and through our daily lives—this is what centers us, grounds us in the Ground of Being, heals us and reminds us that we are not alone in our struggles and successes.
One might imagine upon seeing an imprint of five fingers through a frosty pane of glass that they were five separate circles, unattached. But a deeper truth arises at second sight. We are bound to each other and to this planet in ways impossible to speak of. Joseph Campbell wrote that “if we think of ourselves as coming out of the earth, rather than having been thrown here from somewhere else, you see that we are the earth, we are the consciousness of the earth. These are the eyes of the earth. And this is the voice of the earth.” We are not separate from, not above nor below. We are of the whole, part of the One. The same force that moves the planets, unfolds the petals of a rosebud, surges through a bolt of lighting, runs through us. Consciousness is embedded in all creation and awaits nothing but a fuller sense of awakening, a deeper awareness of the oneness of things.
When I look at your photographs, or you at mine, we catch a glimpse of that oneÂness. Everything around us is a mirror to who we are. If you tell me a parable, I learn a lesson for my life. If you read me a poem about dying, I feel in my bones every heartbreakÂing death I’ve witnessed. If I see a Monet or listen to Mozart, my spirit travels out to a more public place, to revel with others in the presence of such beauty. That is why a photo of a woman in Hawaii can help a woman in Nebraska break through some barrier to self-love, and why a portrait of one woman’s wrinkled face can ease another’s transition into aging. We are all hungry for the same nourishment, all vessels filled from one universal stream of human emotion.
It is art that transcends our illusions of difference, utters what we have long forgotÂten—that there is only one human nature and each of us is a single facet, constantly changing, reflecting each other’s light and shadow. May the art that we create add fire to the world, light and wonder, healing and joy for ourselves and others.
For Your Reflection:Â Give some thought to what the “sacred” is in your life and to the spiritual truths that guide you on your path. Make a photo excursion, and gather images that reflect this sense of sacredness and illustrate the essential oneness of all beings.
Humanity groans half-crushed under the weight of the advances it has made. It does not know sufficiently that its future depends on itself. It is for it, above all, to make up its mind if it wishes to continue to live. — Henri Bergson http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henri_Bergson
What is within is also without. What is without is also within. He who sees difference between what is within and what is without goes forevermore from death to death. — The Vedas
The Promised Land always lies on the other side of wilderness. — Havelock Ellis
The good news is that nothing is imÂportant. The bad news is that nothing is unimportant. — A. B. Curtis (I love this one!)
Our whole business in this life is to restore to health the eye of the heart whereby God can be seen. — St. Augustine http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Augustine_of_Hippo
If the path before you is clear, you’re probably on someone else’s. — Joseph Campbell http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joseph_campbell
Whoever does not see God in every place does not see God in any place. — Rabbi Elimelech http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elimelech_of_Lizhensk
Those who have no compassion for themselves have none for others either. — Rabbi Meir http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rabbi_Meir
The real moment of success is not the moment apparent to the crowd. — George Bernard Shaw http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Bernard_Shaw
I must, before I die, find some way to say the essential thing that is in me, that I have never said yet—a thing that is not love or hate or pity or scorn, but the very breath of life, fierce and coming from far away, bringing into human life the vastness and fearful passionless force of non-human things. — Bertrand Russell http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bertrand_russell
Some day, after we have mastered the winds, the waves, the tides and gravÂity, we shall harness the energies of love. Then, for the second time, man will have discovered fire. — Teilhard de Chardin http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Teilhard_de_Chardin
It is almost impossible for an indiÂvidual alone to dissent from this culture. Alternative cultures and comÂmunities must be built up to support the dissenting consciousness. — Rosemary Radford Reutwer
