Do a photo meditation while brushing your teeth

Monday 11 November 2019, 16:32 by Elvira Smit | 5,001 views | 3 comments

This article was translated from Dutch with the help of AI. Read the original.

I hate brushing my teeth. I think it is a pointless, repetitive activity. Until I suddenly realised that you can combine it with photography. That makes everything more fun. So turn brushing your teeth into a little photo meditation!

Brushing your teeth is boring

Every day I have a battle with myself over brushing my teeth, I don't feel like it, but I do it anyway. And of course I brush for far too short a time. Recently, while brushing my teeth, I wandered into my living room out of boredom, looking to see whether a ship was sailing past on the Maas. Nothing went past, so I aimlessly leafed through a photography book by Martin Usborne.

If I had been a character in a Donald Duck comic strip at that moment, that would have been when a small flashing light appeared above my head:

Because it suddenly occurred to me that I had once decided to do a photo meditation every day: looking at a photograph without interruption for two minutes. Of course, I never did it, the resolution got lost among my daily concerns.

But if you link a new resolution to something you already do every day, it becomes much simpler.

While brushing your teeth, then. That bit of time that is already 'lost' anyway.

Carrying out this resolution is also particularly simple:

1. Pick up your toothbrush

2. Put toothpaste on it

3. Pick up a photography book and open it at a random page

4. Look at the photograph for the entire time you are brushing your teeth

The value of a photo meditation

You see countless photographs every day. But how many images do you really look at? We usually save that for the museum. And even then, it is particularly difficult not to head for the accompanying sign first to read what we are supposed to see (here I write about why you should not do that).

To train your eye, it is therefore good to look at one image for a little longer, under slight pressure.

Don't be mistaken, it is difficult. I have a huge urge to quickly turn the page when I come across a 'boring' photograph. But I am not allowed to do that, at least not according to myself. Because looking at a boring photograph for a long time almost always reveals something new.
That gets easier if you ask yourself a few questions about a 'boring' photograph:

Why did the photographer take this photograph, from this particular angle?
Where did the light come from?
What happened just before and just after this photograph?
What is this photograph telling me?

About the dogs in these photographs

I am currently doing a photo meditation in which I work my way through an entire photography book step by step. One photograph from the book The Silence of Dogs in Cars by Martin Usborne during each brushing session. Usborne draws on a childhood memory, or actually a childhood fear: waiting in the car as a small child until your mother comes back.

He sees that same dependence in dogs in cars. And so he made a series about it. I have owned the book for years, but I am now seeing it with different eyes and much more attention.

In short, I wholeheartedly recommend learning to really look at photographs while brushing your teeth too.

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