gee hurkmans

THE POWER OF SIMPLICITY

Simplicity is the ultimate sophistication

~ Leonardo da Vinci

Perfection is achieved not when there is nothing more to add,

but rather when there is nothing more to take away.

~ de Saint-Exupery

The Northern French coast in January offers no comfort to people with a melancholic disposition. Deserted streets with boarded-up storefronts, peeling faded glory, and screaming billboards desperately seeking the summer and the sun. The rhythmic pounding of waves, driven by the stormy wind, rolls across the boulevard, and a mist of sea spray settles on my glasses as I walk onto the beach. After two days of waiting, the rain has finally given way to occasional showers. When I pause for a moment and let the surroundings sink in with all my senses, the misty horizon seems to disappear into the sea, amplifying the feeling of infinity. A triad of sea, horizon, and sky.

Emptiness is my photographic habitat. Emptiness is infinite, unfathomable, without limitations. Emptiness is space for imagination, fantasy. Emptiness is space to dream. Emptiness is nothing and therefore everything, for it defines the something. Emptiness is the unknown, the undiscovered, the *Hic sunt dracones* in the *terra incognita* of old maps. Emptiness is a lost love. Emptiness exists only in our minds; nature knows no emptiness. Emptiness is my photographic habitat.

I leave Dunkirk behind me and head toward the emptiness. Not just the physical emptiness; the mind, too, must be free of expectations and preconceived images, with the senses focused on the here and now. If you search too hard for compositions, you won’t find them, or they’ll be cliché. When you start with a set goal, expectations arise, and expectations are deadly to creativity because they disconnect us from reality, from what is here and now. Expectations rule out discoveries. The best way to enter unknown territory is with ignorance. Photography literature knows the French term *flâneur*, wandering aimlessly, randomly, without haste. Though the term is often used for street photographers like Cartier-Bresson and Winogrand, it is equally applicable to landscape photography. A relaxed alertness allows you to respond naturally and creatively to the ever-changing environment.

I see myself from above, standing on this deserted beach, and the realization that waves were crashing on this shore long before there were humans makes me humble. A sobering thought against the last remnants of anthropocentrism.

I walk hunched against the wind, meandering, eyes wide. What are you looking for in this emptiness? A little further on, it’s just as empty, isn’t it? In the distance to my left, the Saint-Pol lighthouse withstands the pounding of the waves. That’s what you often see in photos: a brick structure, 35 meters tall, robust, steadfast, defying the forces of nature—a symbol of human progress and control over nature. These images contrast sharply with what I see now. I am still far from the tower, and it appears small and unremarkable in the corner of my eye, overshadowed by the vast emptiness around it. I form a frame with my thumbs and index fingers, positioning the lighthouse all the way in the bottom left. And then the composition reveals itself without me searching for it. Only then do I take the camera out of my backpack, and the photo makes itself. An image with a lot of nothing and a little something. What does all that emptiness do to the subject, the lighthouse?

A photo of the sea is a "seascape" with a lot of emptiness. How far can you go with emptiness? When does a photo become nothing more than emptiness? What does emptiness need in order to be defined? In minimalist photography, less is more, but even less is still something. And that something can be very little, as proven by Japanese photographer Hiroshi Sugimoto. He photographs seascapes, and one of his photos even graces the cover of the U2 album *No Line on the Horizon*. All his photos are square, black and white, with the horizon in the middle. Emptiness as a subject.

We see the sea as something calming, like the great shell we held to our ear as children to hear the sound of the ocean. Gazing out over the infinite water, we empty our minds and drift into dreams. The sea is a blank canvas without distractions, on which we shape our ideal world with imagination, painting our inner landscape.

We are never truly turned off (The well known Buddhist monk and author Thich That Hath calls this “Radio Non-Stop Thinking”). In our minds, we replay scenes from the past and worry about how we’ll survive that meeting tomorrow. We are constantly in conversation with ourselves about how we could have done things differently or how we can avoid unpleasantness in the future. And all that ruminating leads to stress, sleeplessness, restlessness, irritation, and a lack of focus. No wonder that an increasing number of well-intentioned self-help books teach us not only how to tidy up our homes but also our minds: Declutter your house, declutter your mind. A Marie Kondo-style mindfulness therapy for the spirit.

In the smörgåsbord of visual stimuli we are exposed to daily, a photo of an empty beach serves as a meditative pause button, pictorial downtime. The image is simple, balanced, monochromatic. A concrete, material subject is absent, so there’s no need to focus. The gaze is expansive, and the number of saccades is limited. The human presence is consciously absent; a modest counterbalance to the 99% of photos where people are the subject. By adding a single element, like a lighthouse, the emptiness gains more definition, more depth. The emptiness surrounding the lighthouse becomes more pronounced, especially when placed in the corner. The lighthouse and the emptiness enter into a relationship. Air and water blend together, the horizon disappears, and the feeling of infinity is amplified. The tower seems to point toward that infinity, as a metaphor for escaping the hustle and bustle and the monotony of everyday life. For me, it embodies the imagination of *Fernweh*—a longing for far-off places.

When you read a lot about Taoism and Zen Buddhism, as I have been doing for about 10 years, it inevitably influences your photography. And not just your photography; it becomes the foundation of your personal philosophy. Yet, I approach writing about this with some hesitation. I am not an expert in Chinese or Japanese language and culture, and I certainly don't want to contribute to the further appropriation of Eastern philosophy in general, or a concept like Zen in particular. Moreover, Taoism and Zen are not easily conveyed through language; their transmission is traditionally based on experience. However, there are two Zen concepts that have fascinated me for years and continue to inspire me: the concept of emptiness (Japanese *Ma*) and the beauty of transience and imperfection (Japanese *Wabi Sabi*).

The *Tao Te Ching* and the *Chuang-tzu* are the two most important works of philosophical Taoism, written in China around the 4th century BCE. These texts serve as a guide to the art of living, even today; the *Tao Te Ching* is the most translated book worldwide after the Bible. One could, with a wink, call it the first self-help book. According to the Tao, the human worldview is shaped by consciously naming differences where there are none. Something is beautiful or ugly, good or bad. We approach the world with a highly judgmental and discriminating (in the sense of "making distinctions") consciousness, using what we have stored and labeled in our minds over the course of our lives for later use. Due to this cognitive need to categorize, classify, and label, we cannot fully experience life. As Frederick Franck states in *The Zen of Seeing*: “Through these labels, we recognize everything, but we see nothing. We know the labels on all the bottles but never taste the wine.” Claude Monet advised forgetting the name of the thing we are looking at in order to truly see.

To survive, this discriminating consciousness can sometimes be necessary, but it should not become an automatic mental reflex that leads us to see ourselves as separate from what surrounds us, separate from the natural process, evaluating everything we perceive in subjective terms, either approving or disapproving. What we find good, we desire; what we do not find good, we reject. We fail to realize that good and not-good, beautiful and ugly, pleasant and unpleasant are inextricably linked. By wanting one and rejecting the other, we create disharmony where none existed. Moreover, we think that by naming something, we also understand it. But once we think we know it, we no longer notice its properties and qualities. If we truly pay attention, we see each object and situation as if for the first time, over and over again, freeing ourselves from our habitual way of looking: "seeing beyond seeing."

A photographer (or any artist) who approaches their work with such a limited mindset is not sufficiently open to spontaneous events and new discoveries and lacks the creativity to engage with them. Minor White, one of the most influential American photographers of the last century, said about this:

“The state of mind of a photographer while creating is a blank… [but] It is a very active state of mind really, a very receptive state of mind, ready at an instant to grasp an image, yet with no image pre-formed in it at any time.”

Such an open, unprejudiced view of the world requires humility. Humility is central to Zen philosophy. In Zen-inspired art, this is reflected in an aesthetic that favors simplicity, minimalism, the beauty of imperfection and transience (Wabi Sabi), and the use of emptiness (Ma). Japanese concepts of beauty often seem to stand in stark contrast to what is traditionally valued in the West. According to Leonard Koren (Wabi-Sabi for Artists, Designers, Poets & Philosophers), conventional Western beauty is monumental, durable, and spectacular, whereas in Japan, the emphasis is on refinement, simplicity, and imperfection. This may be a generalization, but it holds a core of truth. The numerous Japanese aesthetic concepts are difficult to explain even for the Japanese, let alone for a non-Japanese to fully grasp. However, what all these concepts have in common is the idea that beauty can be found in the most unexpected forms. Wabi-Sabi seeks beauty in imperfection, transience, the incomplete, in humility, and the unconventional. Ma, the beauty of emptiness and formlessness, views emptiness as the ultimate form of simplicity.

One could say that Zen strives to unlearn everything we, as humans, have learned, allowing us to see the world as it truly is, without judgment and without attachment. Achieving this requires a rigorous mental effort, only possible if we can let go of the sense of self. It is a state where the mind is focused on nothing. With such a Mushin mindset (translated as “no-mind”), we can observe the world without a filter and without our constantly working and judging brain clouding our perception.

From birth, we are instilled with a dualistic view of the world, thanks to the Bible and Descartes. We learn to see ourselves as spectators, separate from the rest of the world—distinct from everything that does not belong to our ego. This process happens so gradually and imperceptibly that it becomes completely internalized, and we forget that this idea was taught to us. In Zen teachings, the ego is an illusion; we are what we perceive. Only with a non-dualistic mindset can we fully harness our creativity, and true art emerges.

To understand the world around us and interact with others, we use mental boxes to store all our experiences for later use. Every new experience is tested and filtered through what is stored on our mental hard drive. While such mental processes are essential for survival, they also hinder a value-free, unbiased, and open observation. We do not see the world as it truly is, but as we think it is. Through the direct, non-dualistic approach of Zen, we see a more immediate version of nature rather than a verbal interpretation. The mind is a window, not a mirror; we see the world without an intellectual filter.

Eugen Herrigel, a German philosopher who worked in Japan at the University of Sendai in the early 20th century, studied Zen Buddhism through the art of archery (Kyudo) under a Japanese master. He wrote about this in his well-known book, *Zen in der Kunst des Bogenschiessens* (1948), better known in English as *Zen in the Art of Archery*. Although he was later criticized for his fervent Nazi sympathies, his book contributed to the introduction of Zen in the West. Inspired by the work of Japanese-American philosopher D.T. Suzuki, Herrigel saw the practiced effortlessness of Zen (wu-wei) as the foundation for the practice of art. Henri Cartier-Bresson recommended this book at Magnum meetings. It obviously has nothing to do with photography, but he considered it one of the best books to improve your art of photography. In turn, Herrigel's book inspired Robert Pirsig for the title of his famous *Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance* (1974).

"Zen and the art of..." is now applicable to virtually any subject: from happiness to simple living, from saving the planet to how to earn enough money, from flower arranging to maintaining your motorcycle, and from multiple sclerosis (!!) to *Zen and the Art of Cooking Beer-Can Chicken*. These titles may seem somewhat superficial, but they have indeed contributed to the popularity of Zen in the West, particularly in America. Zen is not only associated with various art forms but is actually applicable to just about everything. And with that, all historical and culturally specific meaning of Zen has disappeared.