Photography on Holy Island

Robert Cooper writes:

As a chaplain to the Arts and Recreation I have been organising retreats for calligraphers since the late 1980s. It was not until 2004 that I realised that photography offers an equally effective medium for retreats - quite why it took so long is beyond me!

My first retreat for photographers took place at Marygate House on Holy Island, Northumberland. Thirteen people participated, including my co-leader, the Revd Paul Judson, Communications Officer in Durham Diocese. We began each day began by sharing in morning prayer at the parish church, followed by breakfast. The main creative activity (stimulated by a brief reflection on a theme such as ‘light’ or ‘texture’) took place during the morning when energies were at their greatest. Midday prayer and lunch were followed by an afternoon free for ‘being on the island’. Experience has shown that the Holy Island is a teacher in itself and needs time to be allowed to do its own work. After a pre-supper Eucharist, the day ended with a talk of some kind, followed by night prayer. This simple structure gave an ebb and flow to the day, echoing the movement of the tide around the island.  

But why were we there and what were we trying to do? The answer came to me in some words from a poem by Micheal O’Siadhail:

Anaxagoras the sage
(a century before Plato) mulled it over
on a street like this in Athens.
First question: Why are you here on earth?
Answer: To behold.
No excuses called for.
Contemplation. Seeing. Fierce and intense.

It seemed to me that our primary purpose was not to take photographs, but ‘to behold’; that the heart of the retreat was to be the process of looking and seeing, of opening our eyes and our hearts. What we were there to do was to expose ourselves to this place and this experience: ‘Contemplation. Seeing. Fierce and intense’ – a reminder of Jesus’ words, ‘If your eye is single, your body will be full of light.’ The image came to me that we should think of our eyes as the camera and our hearts as the film – and I realised that this was an example of how the language of photography and the language of spirituality cross over. On a retreat we open ourselves, like the shutter of a camera, to the light and the result is recorded on our hearts. So the retreat participants were encouraged to be aware that, as they opened the shutter of their cameras, they were recording not just the scene, but also how their hearts had been exposed in the process.

This implied a different way of relating to what was in front of the lens. Too often there is something of the intruder and the thief about the photographer. The common language of the craft talks of photographs as ‘shots’. Pictures are ‘taken’. An atmosphere or a view is ‘captured’. In stark contrast, I know of a Japanese landscape photographer who never takes his camera on his first visit to any place. Instead, he simply looks and allows the place to capture him. His example highlighted the importance of letting the place speak and of not imposing ourselves, our vision or our expectations on what we saw. Everyone on the retreat was encouraged to allow themselves to be surprised.

In his autobiography, Nelson Mandela writes of how no-one in a tribal gathering can speak until the chief looks at them and says, ‘I see you.’ Seeing contemplatively requires, moment by moment, that we say to the people and things before our eyes, ‘I see you.’ In such moments we move beyond treating things, and even people, as objects. We recognise their significance and value because we have allowed them to speak to us. In the first chapter of The Go-Between God, John V. Taylor puts this superbly. Writing of what he calls ‘annunciations’ he says:

‘I am not thinking of what is narrowly described as ‘encounter with God’, but of quite unreligious commonplace experiences…what happens is this. The mountain or the tree I am looking at ceases to be merely an object I am observing and becomes a subject, existing in its own life, and saying something to me – one could almost say nodding to me in a private conspiracy. That, in fact, is the precise meaning of the word ‘numinous’, which comes from the Latin nuo, to nod or beckon. The truly numinous experience is marked not only by primitive awe in the face of the unknown or overwhelming, but occurs also when something as ordinary as a sleeping child, as simple and objective as a flower, suddenly commands attention.’

This sort of seeing is impossible unless we first slow down. The cheapness of film and new, ‘no cost’ digital images can tempt photographers to work too fast and without this focus, seeing photographs rather than places or people. But it does not have to be like this. Potentially, photography is a wonderful medium for helping us to live in the present moment. Its particular ability is to record how things are uniquely at the moment of pressing the shutter, revealing the events of that instant and no other. When we become sensitive to this, photography can create an extraordinary intensity of awareness. Like the camera itself, we become focused. When that happens, time drops away; we cease to rush.

Comments by two of the retreat’s participants suggest that this approach worked for them:

‘It was so refreshing having the opportunity to use the sense of sight in such a focused way. Instead of listening to words and reflecting on them, here was an opportunity to find what is there, but never seen, because one was not looking, and then on reflection discover new insights!’

‘Many thanks, again, for the wonderful week. It was an excellent blend of companionship, solitude, reflection, discussion and spiritual strengthening – not forgetting the photography. For me the scene for the week was set with almost your first words, when you quoted David Scott: ‘Eyes take in the light for hearts to see by’, a superb maxim not only for photography but life itself, the phrase has been bouncing around my head all week.’

By way of a postscript I would like to add a further thought about place. My own photography is concerned largely with the landscape and natural forms and I believed that the atmosphere of Holy Island would make an important contribution to a retreat of this kind. Despite this, I believe that the approach outlined in this article would work equally well in an urban retreat on the street. More than anything else I have been influenced by some words from Thomas Traherne’s Centuries, ‘Your enjoyment of the world is never right till you so esteem it that everything in it is more your treasure than a King’s Exchequer full of gold and silver… Some things are little on the outside, and rough and common, but I remember the time when the dust of the streets was as precious as gold to my infant eyes…’ This reminds us about opening our eyes (and our hearts) to perceive God where we are, not just in the obviously beautiful. Once again it is John V. Taylor who expresses this best:

‘The Holy Spirit’, he writes, ‘is that power which opens eyes that are closed, hearts that are unaware and minds that shrink from too much reality. If one is open towards God, one is open also to the beauty of the world…and the pain of disappointment and deformity…One cannot chose to be open in one direction and closed in the other. Vision and vulnerability go together. Insensitivity is also an all-rounder. If for one reason or another we refuse really to see another person, we become incapable of sensing the presence of God.’

This article first appeared in "Retreats 2004" magazine.

The photographs on this page were taken at the Retreat by Pat Francis, Peter Tyreus, Charles Ward and Richard Vann.   To see a larger version, click on the appropriate image.