Still channelling Daido Moriyama — a street photography walk round Cambridge with a philosophical thought in mind

Provoke App Icon
Yesterday I posted a few photos using the Provoke camera app and later on that evening and this afternoon on the way to get some food for supper I took a few more shots which I post below (click on a photo to enlarge it).

I post them partly because, as I took them — and consciously aware of Moriyama's work and attitude —, I'm reminded that taking photographs in this way (at speed and in an urban setting with many people around all moving at speed this way and that) that there is simply no time to worry about framing things "perfectly" or getting super-sharp focus, you just have to be completely in the melee and be open to whatever is happening. This mode of taking photographs (street photography) seemed to connect very strongly with something said by the philosopher Paul Wienpahl (1916-1980) which regular readers of the blog will know I have adopted as describing well my own approach to philosophy and religion:

"As I see it, the point is not to identify reality with anything except itself. (Tautologies are, after all, true.) If you wish to persist by asking what reality is; that is, what is really, the answer is that it is what you experience it to be. Reality is as you see, hear, feel, taste and smell it, and as you live it. And it is a multifarious thing. To see this is to be a man without a position. To get out of the mind and into the world, to get beyond language and to the things is to cease to be an idealist or a pragmatist, or an existentialist, or a Christian. I am a man without a position. I do not have the philosophic position that there are no positions or theories or standpoints. (There obviously are.) I am not a sceptic or an agnostic or an atheist. I am simply a man without a position, and this should open the door to detachment" (An Unorthodox Lecture, 1956).
























Comments

Excellent stuff Andrew ! You'll make me get an iPhone again and then get Provoke .. Although my Olympus XZ-1 and certainly the X100S comes close to this, i am still very tempted. Well done
Thank you Ilko. When I use a proper camera for street photography its a Ricoh GR. But perhaps that's no surprise to hear.

Best wishes,

Andrew

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