A pioneering book on how mindful meditation informs an artist's vision.
Photography and meditation are known to facilitate reflection and introspection. They teach us to see both the outer world and the mysterious landscape within. In Nowhere in Place, photographer Christopher Jordan explores the meeting place between meditation and photography and how this mirroring of outer and inner worlds plays upon both the surface of his consciousness and the sensor of his digital camera.
Before Jordan ventures outside to make pictures, he spends time in quiet meditation. This is an important process of switching gears from the everyday noise of the cluttered mind to a more serene state of awareness. This reset allows Jordan to see the world in fresh ways, appreciating overlooked details that might escape a mind preoccupied with business-as-usual.
The book starts in Tuscaloosa, where Jordan lives. For many, T-town is a place of Southern charms and Alabama football, but, for Jordan, it becomes a visual play of textures, colors, and abstract planes with nary a person in sight. The pictures reveal a placeless solitude within the frame of his camera. The book moves west to Boulder, another college town, where his contemplative eye continues to fix upon unusual shapes, colors, and textures while intersecting with an occasional figure. The book reaches full bloom in India, where the interplay between inner and outer landscapes knows no bounds, as his camera reveals a kaleidoscopic interplay of people, places, and things.
Within each locale, Jordan photographed "nowhere" in particular, because, for him, the photograph becomes a place of its own being: a sanctuary for meditation, a record of what is seen and heard and felt, an opportunity to see a place and an image right now. For Jordan, the photograph is a medium of meditation and transcendence, providing a point of intersection where one recognizes our shared, common humanity.
Jordan, Christopher: - Christopher Jordan is a photographer and Professor of Art and Art History at the University of Alabama in Tuscaloosa. His photography engages many styles, ranging from classical, large-format, black-and-white images to the experimental, material-based digital images one sees in this collection. A common denominator in all his work is a sense of place and how photography can be used for reflection, memory, and contemplation. Jordan also maintains an intensive "householder" spiritual practice, integrating yoga, meditation, and mindfulness into his life and work. Jordan's photographs have appeared in Diffusion: Unconventional Photography, Lenscratch, the national traveling photography exhibition, "Spinning Yarns," and numerous exhibitions in the United States, Canada, and Mexico. Jordan's Website is www.jordanphoto.com.
Lazer, Hank: - Hank Lazer retired in 2014 from his positions as Associate Provost for Academic Affairs, Executive Director of Creative Campus, and Professor of English at the University of Alabama. He continues to teach seminars on Zen Buddhism and Radical Approaches to the Arts. He has published thirty-one books of poetry, most recently Slowly Becoming Awake (N32) (Dos Madres Press, 2019), Poems that Look Just Like Poems (PURH, 2019), Evidence of Being Here: Beginning in Havana (N27) (Negative Capability Press, 2018), and Thinking in Jewish (N20) (Lavender Ink, 2018). Lazer's poems have been published widely in England, France, Italy, and China, and he has performed jazz-poetry improvisations in the United States and Cuba with musicians Davey Williams, Omar Pérez, Andrew Raffo Dewar, and Holland Hopson, among others. Lazer has given readings and talks throughout the United States and in England, France, Canada, Cuba, and China. Video installations of his work, in collaboration with Holland Hopson and Jane Cassidy, have appeared in galleries in the U.S. In 2015, Lazer received the Harper Lee Award, the State of Alabama's most prestigious literary prize, for lifetime achievement in literature.
