Exercises in De Maistrian Photography

Photographing the mundaneAccording to De Botton, all that is required of the traveler attempting to take a De Maistrian journey is a “traveling mindset”, characterized by receptivity. This simple shift in mindset is enough to make your daily environs seem new, exotic, and exciting. De Botton describes his De Maistrian journey through his Hammersmith neighborhood, finding himself on a road he walked along “almost every day to reach my Underground station and was unused to regarding it as anything other than a means to an end.” With his new “receptive” mindset, the unremarkable street became full of observable details and people-watching opportunities.
While reading De Botton’s chapter, I realized that my photography professor has been (probably unwittingly) urging my class towards practicing a De Maistrian form of photography. He calls it “thinking pictorially.” With street photography, the goal is to take the seemingly mundane and turn it into compelling photographs. Executing these photographs successfully requires a shift in mindset towards receptivity, because when we are receptive “we carry with us no rigid ideas about what is or is not interesting.” Thus, when “thinking pictorially,” things we normally disregard as automatically banal and uninteresting are suddenly photographic material. Window reflections add second and third dimensions to space, telephone wires become long, sloping lines dividing the sky, and the people passing by are suddenly subjects of portraits.
Surprisingly, I found that this kind of photography was difficult to do while traveling. I’ve returned from my weekend trips away from the now-familiar surrounds of Paris with a few great photographs, a lot of touristy photographs, and very, very few “De Maistrian” photographs. I had trouble “thinking pictorially” when I was away because I was too busy thinking in other ways, I was trying to take it all in: there was far too much to look at, to taste, to smell. My friends and I were too focused on trying to get to the next museum, the next site, the next restaurant. On a three-day trip to a new city, this kind of mentality is necessary in order to “see” everything. Given the time restraints, I didn’t have the desire to stand in a Barcelona metro station for 30 minutes and think about photographing the horizontal planes, the fluorescent lights, and the movement.
Then again, another element that certainly played a role in inhibiting my picture taking was being with other people. De Botton comments on the advantages of solo travel when going De Maistre-style; being alone gave him “the freedom to act a little weirdly.” When alone, I can pursue whatever photographic leads I think I see, I can take as many shots as I want until I get the photo the way I like it. My friends definitely would not have been cool with waiting 20 minutes for me as I stood at every interesting street corner I saw, taking hundreds of shots until I got the right traffic pattern for my photograph. For now, I’ll stick to solo treks around Paris for my De Maistrian exercises in photography.