Photography is sharing

These days, there are so many ways to share our images - our cameras now prompt us to upload our photographs to Facebook, Flickr, Twitter.... and so we might forget the conversation and relationship that is prompted by a less virtual experience of sharing photographs.

I've been working with Global Generation, a Kings Cross-based charity that is rethinking what cities can be. Young people, the 'Generators' are being supported and trained to inspire others to create a new and sustainable future. Finding new and interesting ways to express the vision for their work is critical - and, rather than a typically corporate 'mission statement', the Global Generation vision is a living, ongoing conversation that is regularly revisted and re-interpreted.  

While the generators use social media extensively to share their work, here are Patrick and Kara using digital images, taken themselves during a field trip, as a prompt to express the values and relevance around what a tricky concept like sustainability means to them.  In this kind of participative photography, the quality of the image takes a backseat to the quality of conversation and relationship that the image provokes.

Many organisations issue a vision and then expect people to have a conversation about it - but that's the wrong way round.

It's our shared conversations, in moments like this, that show us the shared possibility of our vision.

I consider a tree

Hugh Dunford-Wood

Hugh P is away at the conference in Mexico this weekend and will be presenting the short film we made to accompany the new translation of Martin Buber's 'I and Thou', one of the foundational dialogue texts.

Throughout our research, we asked experts in their field, physicists, mathematicians, botanists and ecologists to 'consider a tree' and here is artist Hugh Dunford Wood sketching a tree in the Cotswold hills. Hugh had travelled up from Dorset and was, for a painter, travelling remarkably lightly. All was revealed though when, after a short trek to find our tree, one that he had painted perhaps 20 years previously, Hugh took an iPad from his bag and started work.

Using an art programme which built up layers (similar, in a way, to Photoshop) Hugh used an initial sketch as a basis for his image.

Sketch - Hugh Dunford Wood

Then he continued to 'paint' away, building his image over a period of a couple of hours to produce this beautiful final picture.

A tree '(re)considered' by Hugh Dunford Wood

And here is the original painting, hanging on the wall of Hugh P's house, which inspired our day!

Painting - Hugh Dunford Wood

Roots...

It doesn't look like this image will make it into the Martin Buber film that Hugh is making for the Mexico conference.

But I kinda like it...

It is a picture that I borrowed from Rachel Piper (who does some gorgeous woodland shots). OK, to be honest, I have somewhat abused her work after being inspired by a card in the British Library. The card showed an old negative image of a tree and it had been left the wrong way up on the shelf...

The image took me back to a moment in a very particular dialogue.

A few of years ago, I was walking with my son, who was about 8 years old at the time, through some woodland on the edge of the Conway Valley in Wales.  Our conversation went like this:

Me: Hey - do you think if you touch a tree it can actually feel you doing that?

Him: Yep.

Me: You seem pretty sure about that... Trees do that kinda thing?

Him: Of course they can feel you.... They can feel you before you touch them.

Me: Huh? How does that work...?

Him: You're standing on their roots...

And with that, the world turned upside-down.

Virtually there...

A while ago I was sitting with my meus co-director Ty Francis at Manchester airport waiting for a flight to Switzerland.  We were both tapping away on our phones - occasionally taking a moment to fall into a real conversation but the quickly drifting back into our virtual worlds.

For two organisation consultants who specialise in presence and relational practice the irony was not lost on us.

So we tweeted about it.  Then we took photos and tweeted them too...

Now I see that Social Media Anxiety Disorder (SMAD) might be the next illness we create.

And so I've become fascinated with images of people wandering around in their virtual worlds, oblivious to all around them, sometimes with faces lit up by the glow of the tiny screens. It's all rather magical and rather beautiful, I think.

Or maybe I'm a little bit SMAD....

Yeah, anyway, you can follow me on Twitter...!

Update (29 Apr): See this NYTimes article on the disconnecting nature of our virtual conversations.

All of This and Nothing

I've been working with my Ashridge colleague Hugh P on a dialogue project which will celebrate a new translation of Martin Buber's 'I and Thou.'

Buber's work is often seen as one of the founding texts of conversational practice and dialogue; he believes in the fundamental wholeness of nature and our complete participation in it.  Hugh has been working with a short piece of Buber's work, "I consider a tree...'" and we have been asking top academics from the fields of physics, mathematics, botany, ecology and art, "So, how do you see a tree?"  In turn, I have been working photographically with the various responses to produce images for a film which Hugh will present at a conference in Mexico next month.

This image came from our conversation with the brilliant Andrew Steane, Professor of Physics at Exeter College, Oxford.  Andrew guided us into through the matter and forces that make up a tree before takinging us into the shadowy world of quantum physics where the idea of matter itself becomes erm... problematic...  We know that we have information pointing to the existence of matter but actually putting a finger on it....

So, here is my quantum tree.  We can see information that leads us to think of the tree but... it kind of isn't really there....

Martin Buber - I consider a tree

I can look on it as a picture: stiff column in a shock of light, or splash of green shot with the delicate blue and silver of the background.

I can perceive it as movement: flowing veins on clinging, pressing pith, suck of the roots, breathing of the leaves, ceaseless commerce with earth and air - and the obscure growth itself.

I can classify it in a species and study it as a type in its structure and mode of life.

I can subdue its actual presence and form so sternly that I recognize it only as an expression of law...

I can dissipate it and perpetuate it in number...

In all this the tree remains my object, occupies space and time, and has its nature and constitution.

It can, however, also come about, if I have both will and grace, that in considering the tree I become bound up in relation to it. The tree is no longer It. I have been seized by the power of exclusiveness.

The Creative Moment

So much of our 'creativity' work in organisations assumes that we should work together in some kind of perpetual collective brainstorm.

My Photo-Dialogue work with the London designers showed that collective work was only a part of their process.  Indeed, their creative group work seemed to take place in just twos and threes. None of the big corporate jamboree stuff that is usually so popular.

I know that 'big, diverse, sociable and provocative' has a place in promoting innovation and change in our businesses and social institutions.

Yet our inquiry into design processes showed that, where moments of creative breakthrough are concerned, the potential for providing space so that people can be 'Alone and in the Zone' is often under-estimated.