In praise of the amateur

I'm an amateur photographer, apart from being a professional one,' said Elliott Erwitt at 82, and I think maybe my amateur pictures are the better ones.' Sophie Howarth tells us about her new book The Mindful Photographer

- Sophie Howarth

Readers of this magazine cannot always be described as amateur photographers. Many possess an impressive level of both craft and vision and regularly create images of a quality to rival those produced by professionals. And yet in striving to excel, we can find ourselves unintentionally forgetting the true meaning of amateurism (doing something purely for the love of it) and even sacrificing the freshness of vision that often belongs to the beginner.

In my book The Mindful Photographer, I encourage readers to experiment with ways to restore the sense of wonder and curiosity known in Zen Buddhism as shoshin, usually translated as ‘beginner’s mind’. This attitude of openness, eagerness, and lack of preconceptions keeps all creative possibilities open. Photographer Bill Brandt described it eloquently in his book Camera in London: ‘It is part of the photographer’s job to see more intensely than most people do. He must have and keep in him something of the receptiveness of the child who looks at the world for the first time or of the traveller who enters a strange country.’