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14 - The Above Two PATHways

Do Think More is a cognitive pathway.

It's about the now.

But it's also retrospective, such as evaluation of what you've done before.

It's also about opportunity and the future.

You may plan a project, for example.

Cognitive implies that affect is absent.

Our emotions are present, but are experienced verbally, rather than more directly via the body.

Don't Think So Much is a dual pathway:

This pathway is experienced more directly, more in the now, with less filtering through the cognitive, the verbal.

It can be about using your intuition, your store of previous experiences with photography.

It can be about the permutations of chance, including luck, serendipity, stumbling upon, accidents, mistakes, and so forth.

Why?

Because judgment is turned down, there is a loss of control, allowing the above to happen.

Which of the two pathways is better?

Which is better for you?

Argh!

Black-and-white thinking!

When I was a adolescent, I described myself as being a cynical, optimistic, existentialist.

(Ah, those days of reading the Sand County Almanac, Herman Hesse, Rimbaud)

Anyways, adults would look askance, perhaps thinking I didn't understand my collection of seemingly opposite ways-of-being.

We're not one or the other, all the time. We're shades of gray.

We use both pathways.

Andy Grunberg wrote of how Henri Cartier-Bresson and Helen Levitt constructed their photographs:

Helen Levitt was the first American photographer to fully understand the essence of Henri Cartier-Bresson's photographic message and put it into practice.

Like Cartier-Bresson, she understood how to combine intuition and intellect to forge sophisticated, lyrical compositions from commonplace events.1

1 Grundberg, A. (1990). Crisis of the real: Writings on photography, 1974-1989. New York: Aperture.