I N K A M A R T Í

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P h o t o g r a p h y a s e n c h a n t m e n t

«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 overtwo thousand years ago. «In what consists the fasting of the heart? Concentrateyour 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 stopwith its images. Let your spirit, though, be like a blank, passively responsive toexternals. 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. Silentand alone, wandering the earth pursued by lights and shadows. Stopping fromtime 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 instru-ment that perceives and listens to the wind, the changes in light, the murmursand whispers, the range of colours and forms, the reflections and the clouds untilthat moment of perfection suddenly occurs: that mysterious and transcendentharmony uniting microcosm and macrocosm. The photographer captures thatfleeting instant and stores it away in a little magic box. I too seek to capture whatI 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 needto capture images of the beauty of the world around me. Just as I collect flowerseeds in autumn, I feel that, through photography, I am collecting images of aworld which is fast disappearing. A single photograph is like a seed which em-bodies energy, light, symbol, soul, vision, imagination and ecstasy, and searchesto 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

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It was my dreams which led me to become a photographer. For the last thir-teen 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 inCuaderno de noche – my Dream Journal. My dream images are so vivid, so in-tense and so beautiful that I wanted to bring them to life. But I’m hopeless atdrawing. It was that inability to faithfully represent my dreamscape which setme on the search. My particular obsession is capturing the light which shines indreams. This passion drew me irresistibly to photography and then to publishinga 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 Edi-ciones Atalanta, a small independent rural-based publishing house, which pu-blishes ten finely-crafted books a year in Spanish.

www.inkamarti.com

© J

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