The Discipline of Stillness

If you cannot sit on a rock for two hours without taking out your phone, you cannot photograph a landscape. The two skills are the same skill, and the skill is not photographic. It is older than photography and will outlast it.

Stillness is unfashionable. We have built a century around its opposite — constant motion, constant input, constant the next thing. A landscape, by definition, refuses to participate in any of that. A landscape will wait. A landscape will, in some sense, only ever be photographable by someone who has learned to wait alongside it.

Young photographers ask me what to study. I tell them to study sitting. To pick a spot and remain in it without reaching for distraction. The longest minute they will ever spend will be the seventh. The fortieth will pass without their noticing. The hundredth is where the photograph lives.