Inka Martí. Photo Off París 2013

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INKA MARTร

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Photography as enchantment «Look at this window: it is nothing but a hole in the wall but, because of it, the whole room is full of light», wrote the Chinese philosopher Zhuangzi over two thousand years ago. «In what consists the fasting of the heart? Concentrate your will. Hear not with your ears, but with your mind; not with your mind, but with your spirit. Let your hearing stop with the ears, and let your mind stop with its images. Let your spirit, though, be like a blank, passively responsive to externals. In such open receptivity only can Tao abide.

And that open receptivity is the fasting of the heart.»

Zhuangzi’s words encapsulate the type of photographer I seek to be. Silent and alone, wandering the earth pursued by lights and shadows. Stopping from time to time to contemplate, emptying the mind and heart and becoming one

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with the world around. The observer is thus transformed into a delicate instrument that perceives and listens to the wind, the changes in light, the murmurs and whispers, the range of colours and forms, the reflections and the clouds until that moment of perfection suddenly occurs: that mysterious and transcendent harmony uniting microcosm and macrocosm. The photographer captures that fleeting instant and stores it away in a little magic box. I too seek to capture what I feel to be true particles of those parallel universes of subtle forms.

The more out of control the destruction of nature, the more I feel the need to capture images of the beauty of the world around me. Just as I collect flower seeds in autumn, I feel that, through photography, I am collecting images of a world which is fast disappearing. A single photograph is like a seed which embodies energy, light, symbol, soul, vision, imagination and ecstasy, and searches to connect with others whose eyes observe and sense their glorious correlation.

Photography is observation, perspective and perception.

But for me, it is so much more than that.

It is: Vision, appearance, spirit, contemplation, intuition, shade, dream, omen, imagination Imagination, intuition, clairvoyance, acumen, spark, idea, myth, fable, daydream, phantom, soul Soul, spirit, substance, essence, psyche, sensitivity, feeling, will, intelligence, inner self, heart, ecstasy Ecstasy, fascination, delight, divine madness, uplifting, amazement, enchantment.

So, photography as enchantment

© Jordi Esteva

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It was my dreams which led me to become a photographer. For the last thirteen years, I have been writing my dreams down in a journal as soon as I awake.

Every new year, a new journal. In 2011, I published a selection of 65 dreams in Cuaderno de noche – my Dream Journal. My dream images are so vivid, so intense and so beautiful that I wanted to bring them to life. But I’m hopeless at drawing. It was that inability to faithfully represent my dreamscape which set me on the search. My particular obsession is capturing the light which shines in dreams. This passion drew me irresistibly to photography and then to publishing a book in digital format, which I called Espacios oníricos (Dream Spaces).

Besides being a photographer and a writer, I also work as co-editor at Ediciones Atalanta, a small independent rural-based publishing house, which publishes ten finely-crafted books a year in Spanish. www.inkamarti.com