I read somewhere that you don’t find books; books find you! This is where this project started, with a book finding me. As I walked past the bookstore at Canberra airport on my way home from delivering a workshop, a little blue book by Garcia and Miralles titled ‘Ikigai: The Japanese Secret to a Long and Happy Life’, caught my eye. While my immediate thoughts were that this is a Westernised self-help book targeted at people looking for happiness, the concept of ikigai fascinates me. I had a keen curiosity about Japanese culture since reading James Clavell’s Shōgun novel as a teenager, and the notion of an ancient philosophy around life’s purpose struck an accord. The Holga Experiment was a project developed as a way for me to explore a different creative approach. It stripped out all complex photography equipment to a bare camera body and an inexpensive toy camera lens. It drew me closer to a more autobiographical connection with the space I inhabit and photography as a creative practice. More importantly, I was able to realise that this passion I had for photography was more than a fascination, it was, from a Japanese philosophical perspective, my ikigai - my purpose in life!

The joy, insights, learning and creativity I gained from this approach turned an ephemeral experimental project into a more serious one. The work is not only about my experience with photography and the surrounding urban and natural environment but also about photography as a motif. Present within the work are traces of lens-based photography through the presence of light within the image, a robust application of tone and image artefacts created by the optics. This work intends to promote another form of Japanese philosophy with the notions of wabi-sabi. Wabi-sabi is an early Zen Buddhist concept that was first developed during tea ceremonies. It is a concept of finding beauty within imperfection and its self-reflection of life’s quality with all its turbulence as a distraction from purpose. The optical artefacts in this work are produced organically using a plastic toy lens fitted to a digital camera body. The inexpensive Holga lens aids in producing a form of the Holga aesthetic now synonymous with this type of toy film camera. It naturally produces optical artefacts such as low resolving power, strong vignetting, distortion, diffraction, chromatic and spherical aberration that evoke the sensation of imperfection and wabi-sabi.

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Project Status: Completed