thethirdmind

I have been taking photographs for over forty years. I find taking photographs of the World around me deeply relaxing, not unlike how I find riding a motorcycle or cycling, a zen like immersion in the present combined with an awareness of the peripeheral which in my experience depending on fluctuating environmental elements comes in and out of focus, and calls on my intutition and tacit knowing in how I may respond.  Photography like motorcycling and cycling is based on core skills, physical control, interlectual, motor and emotional skills that become a repositry of learned knowledge and experience. Curiosity, memory and a desire to share are some of the motivators of my taking pictures, the creativity of working with light and darkness and communicating a glimmer of the beauty I see around me. 

A poem that says a lot to me sums up one of my approachs to photography and life:

Williem de Kooning

'Each new glimpse is determined by many,
 Many glimpses before.
 It's this glimpse which inspires you-like an occurrence, and I notice those are always my moments of having an idea
 that maybe I could start a painting

Everything is already in art - like a big bowl of soup, everything is in there already:
 And you just stick your hand in, and fine something for you. 
But it was already there - like a stew.

There's no way of looking at a work of art by itself
 It's not self-evident,
 It needs a history; it needs a lot of talking about:
 it's part of a whole man's life.

Y'know the real world, this so-called real world,
 Is just something you put up with, like everybody else.
 I'm in my element when I am a little bit out of this world:
 then I'm in the real world - I'm on the beam.
 Because when I'm falling, I'm doing all right;
 when I'm slipping, I say, hey, this is interesting!
 It's when I'm standing upright that bothers me:
I'm not doing so good; I'm stiff.
 As a matter of fact, I'm really slipping, most of the time,
 into that glimpse. I'm like a slipping glimpser.

I get excited just to see
that sky is blue; that earth is earth. And that's the hardest thing; to see a rock somewhere,
 And there it is: earth-colored rock,
 I'm getting closer to that.

Then there is a time in life when you just take a walk:
 And you walk in your own landscape'.

From Sketchbook 1: Three Americans, 
film script, New York, Time,
 Inc., 1060, pp.6, 7, 8, 9. 10

In Plato's Cave is where you will find thethirdminds photographs in their gallerys, naming and curation of the online depositiries is an ongoing work, and currently exhibits photgraphs thethirdmind has glimpsed with light and time between 2015-2016. The displayed portfolio will hopefully embody the paradox of stasis and dynamisim, expressing elements of thethirdminds and the World abouts evolutionary journey.

Photographic Philosophy and Practice

Of course practice comes first, and the thinking about content, form and motivation to snap, concious and unconcious, comes much later, in my journey anyway. Influencers are Susan Sontag and her book On Photography, John Berger, his book and BBC television series Way's of Seeing and Understanding a Photograph and Roland Barthes Camera Lucida. 

You may ask where does thethirdmind The Third Mind come into all this. My monicker comes from the co writing of William S Burroughs and Brion Gysin and their book The Third Mind. Mr Burroughs was big on the 'cut up' technique, invented by Brion Gysin which he used in his writing. In Plato's Cave - Portfolio