Inner Game Friday December 2, 2005
When I was an undergraduate I discovered Timothy Gallwey’s book The Inner Game Of Tennis, and his other inner game books. Although I’d never been interested in tennis, golf or music-making, I was fascinated to see the way he analysed and articulated the inner psychology of outer activity. I recognised that this ‘inner approach’ was applicable to almost anything you did, so the specific activity wasn’t important. As a teenager, after two years of karate I stopped my training abruptly because I felt no different from when I’d begun. I could perform the kata, do a little sparring half effectively, but it was meaningless: I was the same person and felt no different simply because of a training in external routines. I’d been reading about the Chinese internal arts and Indian yoga, and began to understand it doesn’t have to be that way – there are methods that recognised and refined the way you feel, the way you react and responded to stimuli, and the way you use your body. These are more sophisticated arts, and I began to study them.
After graduating I trained to teach the Alexander Technique which is an ‘internal’ study concerned with how you do things, and in that respect is a pre-technique because it precedes outer movement and activity. It refines your psycho-physical organisation, as the basis for bodily movement. In the East, there’s a tradition of ‘inner study’ facilitating outer ability as seen in the famous book Zen And The Art Of Archery by German academic Eugen Herrigel. Gallwey’s books, and the Zen books that Herrigel spawned, are modern versions of this essential idea that outer expression – whether in martial arts, calligraphy, postural activity or photography – derives from an inner impulse. External appearance is only half of what happens, and is possibly not the most important factor.
It’s easy to be too complicated when considering photographic practice and the most powerful images are often very simple, and analysis adds unnecessary and extraneous information. But it’s clear to me that there’s a psychology to photography – the inner game of image making. When we take a photograph we select a composition which is an aspect of human behaviour or experience. We then manipulate that situation with camera angle, focal length, decisive moment etc, in order to tell a story. Like a novelist, we present an aspect of human reality for the poetic or aesthetic consideration of others, a moment in time abstracted from what came before and what happened next. In that sense photography is psychology, by reflecting and expressing thoughts and feelings.
I like to explain mountain photography in metaphoric and phenomenological terms. The vast panoramas parallel a subtle change of perspective in your personal mood. Mundane responsibilities are increasingly distant, like the increasingly distant valleys when you ascend the hills. It’s a kind of shamanic experience based on sensory phenomenology: leave conventional society behind and enjoy seeing, smelling and listening to an unspoilt place where the rhythms are grander and more imposing, where you perceive your relative insignificance in an implicit larger scale of meaning.
You can’t impose your will on this terrain and find that rather than being weakening or disempowering, the humility is refreshing and invigorating. In that respect my mountain photography fits the idea of ‘the transcendental’ that you also see in Ansel Adams, Thoreau and Wordsworth. That is, in symbolic terms I’m representing a beauty that is harmonising and balancing to the psyche; that it exists constantly as an implicit possibility in the configurations of nature, where you are free from mundane concerns and – sometimes – the nastiness of the city. When you describe this using ‘inner game’ terms, you thereby relate it to the wider field of human capacity and experience that you also see in the Zen and ‘inner game’ books.