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Learning to play with a Camera

"If the patient can't play then something needs to be done to enable the patient to become able to play, after which psychotherapy can begin. The reason why playing is essential is that it is playing and only in playing that the patient is being creative … creativity, then is, the doing that arises out of being, it indicates that he who IS, is alive … creativity, then is the retention throughout life of something that belongs properly to the infant experience: the ability to create the world. And on the BASIS of the sense of having created the world, is build everything that is meaningful … it is crucial to making life feel meaningful and worth living." D.W.Winnicott

Photography can be used as a means of exploring the self. It is the only time we get to really see what and how another has seen the world. When I sit with clients in therapy I'm aware that I'm are hearing about the world from their vantage point, their subjective reality. When I look at a photograph I am looking at the world as if through the eye of someone else. A photograph is an inter-subjective meeting, the photographer with the subject of the photograph. Photographs not unlike dreams are non-verbal communication. They are often symbolic, with layers of meanings and associations. Photography can become a working medium through which we deepen our understanding of ourselves. In dream analysis we ask 'Who is the dreamer dreaming the dream' with photographs the question is "Who is the photographer?"

Exploring the photograph takes me with them to the photographed moment, to their "present moment." (Daniel Stern). Exploring the chosen moment can lead to unraveling of a narrative history in the telling of that moment. I am speaking here of particular more thoughtfully taken photographs, where there is a moment of intense and intimate relating, of "Being with" the object that is being photographing.

In the moment when the photograph was taken, if it was thoughtfully taken, the photographer may not be aware of the ramifications of the meeting, may grasp what is explicit, the implicit requires more thought. If we take the time to look closely this usually includes feelings, beliefs and past experience. Working with clients and their cameras I try to facilitate development of the ability to creatively utilize energies that might otherwise lead to depression and anxiety.

Both in my office and in the "Innescapes" workshops, I ask clients to linger, to slow down and really be present to the moment, to their bodies, to the internal thought-voices, to what they are experiencing. In the workshop I ask each participant to find a flower and to stay with it for five minutes, not to photograph just to be present to themselves and the flower. It is often an influential and exciting moment- depressed clients let the world in and survive, anxious clients find it calms them. Generally they are astonished by what they see when they are able to allow themselves "to be". Photography becomes like a meditation, you hush the voices of self-consciousness, and criticism. This "seeing-into" is a leap out of the isolation of being "in me", -into the world, into the world of being and things, into the present moment. It allows connection with nature, and a response to life, to all kinds of beauty, this in it self is a salve to the emotions.

We can use photographs as a mirror, to show us hidden aspects of ourselves. How we relate to ourselves is a mirror of how we relate to the world. If we look at images in this interpretive light it reveals something about how the photographer exists in the world. We can use our photographs to gain access to hidden layers of the self, if we look beyond the content of the image to what went into choosing the moment there is much to be learned about the photographer.

Lee Kraemer (Lee Hayden-Kraemer) is a PRS member psychotherapist, writer, and photographer in private practice in Toronto. She has a special interest in the creative process, and how playful creativity can enhance one's quality of life. Lee has developed the "Innerscapes" workshop over a number of years, with the intention of providing participants with the opportunity to actively experience and develop their own creativity. This article was first published in the Ontario Society of Psychotherapists news letter.