*Photographing something interesting or beautiful has become a natural reflex. Non-Photography Day is a calendar sculpture, a day formed for action and awareness. Taking part in Non-Photography Day is simple, on the 17th July leave your camera or recording equipment at home and abandon your photo shoots. Whatever your activities that day, appreciate the life and dimesion of the moment you are in rather than documenting the appearance of it.
This day was originally inspired by my own travels through South East Asia. Along the way we came across many awe inspiring creations of both nature and man set in some of the most scenic beauty the world has to offer. However, I noticed that the people around me were mediating much of their interaction with this landscape with a camera, as soon as anything remotely interesting arose, people seemed to instinctively reach for their camera. Their concern was with how best to capture the moment, living these places through their tiny viewfinder.
It seemed to me they were missing out on so much of the given moment through their obsession, an act of possession- of wanting to own the appearance of the place, as if this was all it had to give and photographs were their way of taking it.
The thing is there before our eyes, for it refuses to be ignored; but when we endeavour to grasp it within our own hands in order to examine it more closely or systematically, it eludes us and we lose it’s track’
D.T Suzuki- Essays in Zen Buddhism
This behavior echoed in the streams of images people showed me and now still show me, given much of life for my fellow comrades was spent behind the camera, I wondered if their expereince of these places came from viewing the photographs they took. The only thing I could grasp from the images was that the person had been physically stood in this location, somehow the stories, the perceived magic of the places never emerged.
I wondered if they had been there at all
Since returning from South East Asia and on my travels since I began to see that this was happening more, photographing something beautiful has become a natural reflex. The world is full of people snapping away at fireworks, hoards of photographers trying to capture the many shades of an ever changing sunset or the feeling of autumn and the man with the camera phone chasing the flock of birds in the sky. These happenings inspired me to create Non-Photography Day.