IKEBANA PHOTOGRAPHY

TOKYO GLASS by CINDY NGUYEN

IKEBANA: the Japanese art of flower pruning and arrangement.

Thanks Anne and Cindy

CUTAWAYS by CINDY NGUYEN

My friend Anne from Berlin first introduced me and Cindy to this concept of Ikebana, the Japanese art of flower arrangement.

Art Cutaways x ARTBOOK by CINDY NGUYEN

Cindy has been doing artwork, doing cutaways from magazines, and pasting them in new, novel arrangements.

Original Cutaway by CINDY NGUYEN

What does flower cutting have to do with photography?

Garden Grove, 2016

The philosophy of Ikebana is interesting to me, because it strives for beauty and simplicity of the flower arrangement…through subtracting the superfluous, the messy, and guiding the growth of the flowers.

Kyoto, 2015

To apply this to photography: we start off with reality (the visual world), and we decide how to re-arrange the elements of reality. We decide what to keep, and more importantly… the superfluous elements to CUT from our photos.

How to achieve more zen in your photography

Berkeley, 2015

Ikebana and photography, a nice zen combination.

Practical ideas:

What are the ugly parts of a scene that you want to subtract from your photos? Look at the edges and the background of the photo, and try to subtract the superfluous.
Get a CLEAN BACKGROUND (assignment from STREET NOTES). Start with a clean white or black background, then add in your subjects afterwards. You can do this via the “fishing” technique— finding a nice background and composition, and waiting for your subject to walk into the photo. Or, you can shoot STREET PORTRAITS of your subjects against a simple background.
Keep subtracting from a scene when shooting, but at a certain point…stop subtracting. The secret of wisdom of Ikebana and photography— to know when to stop.

Make it as simple as possible…but not simpler. Apparently Einstein said that.