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Mindful photography is not just about what we see, but how we see. It’s a contemplative way of slowing down enough to experience presence.   From the NAUTICAL REFRACTIONS  series by Anna Wilson Sunlight danced across the worn hulls of fishing boats in Lake Bolsena’s harbour, catching ripples in the water and the textures of chipped paint. In that fleeting shimmer, the ordinary — the harbour, the boats, the gentle lapping of the lake — felt extraordinary. Photographing in that moment became meditation, a pause where noticing and presence converged. From the NAUTICAL REFRACTIONS series by Anna Wilson Mindful photography offers a way to return to a moment, discover inscape  rather than escape, and access creative flow through intentional observation. For anyone seeking a pause from the everyday, it provides a restorative path back to presence and creativity. My venture, Mindful Eye Photography, grew from this insight — and from a desire to create the kind of community I wanted to support my own practice. I am looking to create a space where photographers of all levels may explore, reflect, and create without pressure or comparison — nurturing clarity, fostering connections, and rediscovering inspiration. Mindful photography   draws from Zen and Tibetan dharma art traditions, where art is a form of direct experience and spiritual expression. One lineage, Nalanda Miksang, emphasizes practice over performance — creating from awareness, authenticity, and curiosity rather than ego or decoration. Each photograph becomes a meditation, a way to see deeply, fully, and honestly. From the RECONSTRUCTED series by Anna Wilson “The contemplative practice is to transform the obvious, ordinary experience into an appreciation of the ordinary as extraordinary — the appreciation of it for what it is, the ordinary magic of being alive.”  — McQuade & Hall, Looking and Seeing: Nalanda Miksang Contemplative Photography My photographic workshops, retreats, and journeys begin with stillness — breath work, meditation, connecting to the senses, or simply pausing to observe. The camera becomes a tool for reflection, a frame through which participants explore balance, light, texture, and nuance. Mindful observation turns distraction into focus, revealing patterns and surprises that bring both order and vitality to the photograph. “Anna’s program encouraged me to slow down, be present, and truly reconnect with who I am as a photographer.”  — Jo Gomes, past retreat participant Mindful photography naturally extends to photographing people. John Daido Loori, a Zen Buddhist monk and accomplished photographer, observes in The Zen of Creativity  that the image reveals as much about the photographer as it does about the subject. In street or portrait photography, participants ask: “Am I taking or witnessing?” They approach subjects with curiosity, openness, and ethical sensitivity, considering consent and context.  Costa Rica portrait by Anna Wilson “If your mind is cluttered, your images will be cluttered. If your heart is open, your work will be open." — John Daido Loori, The Zen of Creativity Approaching your subject with presence and respect allows moments to unfold naturally. Portraits and scenes become reflections of relationship, connection, and emotional depth — turning ordinary encounters into extraordinary expressions. Bringing my Mindful Eye Photography program into new landscapes felt like a natural evolution of my work — a way to unite mindfulness, creativity, and exploration. International journeys and retreats explore a variety of stimulating locations, offering opportunities for different types of photography while emphasizing presence, connection, and curiosity. Ordinary scenes — the play of sunlight on a harbour, the textures of a weathered street, or fleeting expressions in a crowd — can feel extraordinary when observed with attention and intention. From the SAN GEMINI series by Anna Wilson These experiences gently nudge photographers towards what heals and inspires, reminding us that noticing and creating are themselves restorative acts. Mindful photography weaves together structure and spontaneity, order and intuition, experientially demonstrating that both coexist beautifully. Whether capturing sunlight dancing on a lake, wildlife on safari, or moments in a bustling street, my goal remains the same: to move with presence, finding stillness in the act of creation. In a world that celebrates speed and productivity, perhaps the real art lies in the pause — in the space between breaths, where order meets chaos and meaning begins to take shape. It is in these moments of presence that photography reflects not only what we see, but also the calm, clarity, and aliveness that emerge when we are fully present. Mindful photography shows us that even amidst life’s chaos, we can find order — and in that balance, beauty, surprise, and meaning emerge. Find out more about joining the next Mindful Eye Photography journey... to SPAIN! ✨Alchemy of Light ✨ An 8-Day Mindful Photography Journey in Spain 🇪🇸⁠ Discover Mindful Eye Photography Join photographer and educator Anna Wilson  for immersive retreats and international journeys that blend photography, mindfulness, and creative flow. mindfuleye.ca  | @mindfuleye_photography

GURU'S TOP PICK WINNER: Laimis Urbonas  • Lithuania  Billed as the world’s greatest photo game, GuruShots is an international competition platform for photographers . Players get feedback from more than three billion monthly voters and try to work their way up through rankings, from Newbie to the ultimate status (and bragging rights) of Guru. TOP PHOTOGRAPHER WINNER: Oliver Isermann • Germany TOP PHOTO WINNER: Il quara vince  • Switzerland  The Power of Minimalism photography challenge showcases an exceptional collection of images by photographers from around the world. GuruShots’ challenges are voted on by the platform’s Gurus and the wider community, with a fresh challenge every day. Winners can receive prizes from GuruShots’ sponsors such as Adorama, Kodak, Lowepro, and Lensbaby.   Bryony Herrod-Taylor • UK   Damjan Žagar • Slovenia    Ivan Miksik •  Czech Republic   Cristina Sarageaua • UK   Gary Luk • USA   Octavian Oprea • UK   Michael Burlak • USA  To find out more, and take part in the next challenge, visit www.gurushots.com Also, check out GuruShots’ newest app AI Art Master.

An imagined, untaken photograph A grainy black and white photograph shows a 32-year-old Black woman, Viola Desmond, standing in line to purchase a ticket in the lobby of the Roseland Theatre, a cinema in New Glasgow, Nova Scotia. It is November 8th, 1946, and Desmond’s hair is perfectly coiffed, a fur stole is draped over her shoulders to ward off the Atlantic autumn air, and a small handbag is tucked into the crook of an elbow. There is confusion at the ticket booth: Desmond requests admission to the orchestra level, but when she attempts to take a seat on the lower level, the white usher stops her and tells her she holds a ticket for the balcony and must sit upstairs. Thinking there has been a mistake, Desmond returns to the cashier and again requests a downstairs ticket, offering to pay the 10-cent difference in cost. She has poor distance vision, she explains, and needs to sit nearer to the screen in order to see. The white cashier tells her, “I’m not permitted to sell downstairs tickets to you people.” The photograph cannot capture these verbal exchanges but registers them nonetheless. The next image is so dimly lit, the figures are nearly obscured, but we can just make out Desmond’s profile in the back of the orchestra, where she has turned in her seat to respond to the theatre manager standing in the aisle. He demands that she leave, threatening to call the police. In her affidavit, Desmond would recount that the manager loudly confronted her, explaining the back of her ticket confirmed the theatre’s right to “refuse admission to any objectionable person.”  She, in return, politely asked if he could acquire a downstairs ticket for her, at which point he became angry and threatened to have her thrown out. An exterior view of the cinema, taken from the sidewalk a few moments later, shows Desmond being carried out of the building towards a taxi waiting at the curb. Starkly lit by the camera’s glaring flash, Desmond’s shoulders are tightly grasped by a police officer while Henry MacNeil, the white theatre manager, carries her feet. A shoe is missing, as is her handbag. In an image taken an hour later, Desmond is in a county jail cell, awaiting arraignment the following day. Her shoe has been retrieved, as has her purse, and she sits bolt upright on a cot: a single bare bulb casts shadows on the cinderblock wall behind her. Two more photographs, taken days later in the bleak light of a physician’s exam room, document bruises on Desmond’s shoulders and ankles. These images constitute an important part of the archive of early civil rights activism in Canada, but they do not exist. They are instead “untaken photographs,” a category of images introduced by Ariella Aïsha Azoulay that do not visualize the spectacular moments of regime-made disasters and therefore “tend to evade the archival filter, or to deceive it.” But these untaken images can be imagined through their traces: the photographs taken just before, just after, or at the periphery of events. The photograph of Desmond that does exist and has most often accompanied stories of her act of civil disobedience and her subsequent arrest and trial, is a studio portrait of her taken six years earlier. In it, Desmond gazes seriously but serenely into the camera, her hair immaculately styled. A heart-shaped pendant at her neck and her darkly pigmented lips suggest the visit to the photo studio was a special occasion, or perhaps its inverse: that Desmond was perennially presentable, using every public appearance as an opportunity to promote her salon on Gottingen Street in Halifax, and the Desmond School of Beauty Culture, which drew students from across Nova Scotia, New Brunswick, and Quebec each year. Viola Desmond It is one of these studio portraits that took on a very different public function when it appeared on the cover of the first illustrated issue of The Clarion newspaper — the first illustrated, Black-owned newspaper in Nova Scotia — in December 1946. Beneath Desmond’s studio portrait, under the title “Takes Action,” the text, authored by editor Carrie M. Best, tells readers a now–familiar story: that Desmond was arrested and fined 20 Canadian dollars plus 6 Canadian dollars in court costs (which is about 260 USD today), for “defrauding the Federal Government of one cent.” Under the guise of a puritanical Canadian law requiring the owners of theatres to charge patrons one cent for every ten they spent on entertainment, the Roseland Theatre manager informed the police that she had committed tax evasion by sitting in a floor level seat while holding a ticket for the balcony, a space that was, as Desmond discovered, implicitly segregated for “coloured people.” No mention of race, nor of segregation, was made in the charges nor in any of the subsequent court proceedings. The Clarion’s coverage of Desmond’s arrest ends with her biography, outlining her education and family members, and includes an appeal to readers to donate to her legal defence fund through the Nova Scotia Association for the Advancement of Coloured People. Cover images from the first illustrated issues of The Clarion newspaper. The Clarion’s particular approach to using everyday, domestic images like Desmond’s portrait, alongside family photographs, on their cover and in their pages demonstrates an urge to narrate and represent Black racism as an everyday event in the Atlantic region, and the wider national landscape, in the 1940s — a history that the Canadian national imaginary has suppressed to the point of near invisibility. At the time of The Clarion’s first issue in 1946, for instance, Nova Scotia had the largest Black population of any province in Canada, a concentration originally produced through the transatlantic slave trade, which then intensified through a series of northerly migrations beginning in the 1790s and accelerating in the early 1900s as free Black citizens moved north to avoid the racist policies of the Jim Crow laws in the United States. The growing Black population in Canada confronted equally discriminatory policies and practices, in ways that were far more nefarious. Unlike Jim Crow law in much of the southern United States, which mandated racial segregation, Canadian segregation was not enacted by a set of laws, but was nonetheless completely legal. The federal government hid behind a non-interference policy that allowed individual businesses to decide whom to serve and to whom to refuse service. As a result, much of the country had de facto racial segregation — in housing, schooling, juries, the military, and even cemeteries, as well as restaurants, bars, theatres, and hotels — even as the law purported to protect all subjects of the dominion equally. It was against this backdrop of quiet, racialized violence that The Clarion deployed family photographs starting with a family photograph of the Prevoe family that appeared on their cover (the first to be illustrated with a photograph) in February 1947. Subsequent issues featured group portraits of the Phyllis Wheatley Business Girls Club of Halifax and the Criterion Club. In each instance, sitters adapted the poses and dress of middle-class culture to present themselves as citizens in the absence of any other recognizable visual lexicon of photographic subjectivity. The family and group portraits featured on The Clarion’s cover were not illustrations of an urgent story of civil rights violations, as was the case with Desmond’s portrait, but were offered without explanation. Obviously, for a community newspaper with limited resources, soliciting family and snapshot photography from readers was an easy solution to the problem of not being able to afford a staff photographer. But there is a reliance on family units and affiliative groups in The Clarion that suggests these images of collectivity also fulfilled a semantic function. Dominant histories of photography have tended to assume that photojournalism is most appropriate for documenting the loud, iconic events of public history, while family photography tends to be overlooked as banal, subjective, and private; as a mode that, at its worst, works to re-inscribe patriarchal, heterosexist, and middle–class ideologies. I want to suggest, however, that The Clarion presented family photographs alongside stories of racial violence to signal that acts of racial discrimination were as common as the act of taking a snapshot portrait. And, by entering homes alongside international news coverage of post-war destruction and reconstruction, and of US segregation, such as those covered by photojournalists, these community newspapers also framed everyday acts of discrimination as acts of violence. These “quiet” images therefore speak to the quiet nature of racial violence in Canada: a quietness, or “politeness,” to use a national stereotype, that made it difficult to publicly challenge and contest. I want to conclude by turning briefly to the sudden reappearance of Desmond’s portrait in the Canadian national imaginary, and to ask whether this might present an opportunity for contemporary viewers to do reparative work with her image. Desmond died at a young age, in 1956. It was only through the efforts of her sister that her story entered the national public record. In 2010, she was the first Canadian to be posthumously pardoned by the Nova Scotia Government, in an order signed by the province’s first Black Lieutenant Governor, Mayann Francis. Canada Post then issued a commemorative stamp featuring her in 2012, and in 2018, Desmond became the first Canadian woman to appear on the country’s 10-dollar bill. This very public circulation of Desmond’s private portrait is a mnemonic device for all the untaken photographs of her acts of resistance: an opportunity to see and recognize her experiences of segregation as forms of the pervasive and sometimes unseeable violence that structures Canadian society. A version of this text previously appeared as an op-ed article in the Toronto Star. (November 15, 2019). This essay is derived in part from an article published in Visual Studies (2021), available online . This story appeared in THE ACTIVISM issue curated by Laurence Butet-Roch. Enjoyed this free read?!  We need your support! JOIN US AS A PATRON   • SUBSCRIBE FOR PRINT DELIVERY   • READ our digital editions   • Make a donation

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The magazine for people who love photography with purpose. MEMORY - Issue #74 The MELD issue #73 Winter 2024/ 2025: COLOUR Fall 2024: TIME Spring/Summer 2024: LIGHT WINTER 2023/24: LAND Fall 2023: WATER Spring/ Summer 2023: FOOD Winter 2022/2023: Botanicals Fall 2022: Photography + Activism Spring/ Summer 2022: Fashion X Future photoED magazine is for: Culture Vultures. People who feel good about surrounding themselves with quality content and ideas. The Community. For intentional photographers seeking authentic, process-driven stories. “It’s the kind of magazine you want to revisit—slow down with, learn from, and maybe even pass along to someone else who’d appreciate it. Highly recommended—and not just for one read, but many.” - Sandrine Hermand-Grisel, AllAboutPhoto.com Featured Blog Articles Current Edition Order Print Edition Subscribe to get this issue + more! The MOVEMENT Issue #75 The MOVEMENT Issue #75 The MOVEMENT Issue #75 The MOVEMENT Issue #75 “Every avalanche begins with the movement of a single snowflake, and my hope is to move a snowflake.” – Thomas Frey Movement. Community, momentum, motion. Our 75th edition in print celebrates photography with forward-facing momentum. Featuring... Xavi Bou & nicholas x bent: Motion in Frame by Corinna vanGerwen Isabelle Hayeur & Ruth Kaplan: Border Stories by Alan Bulley Stuart Robertson: Peace in 10,000 Hands by Craig D’Arville Lori Ryerson: Quiet, noise, and moving in between by Rita Godlevskis Crip Trip: Reframing Disability by Gladys Lou + PORTFOLIO Artists from our International Call for submissions: Lorena Zschaber, Amy Heller, Yasser Alaa Mobarak, Roland Ramanan, Nika Belianina, Xiatong Cai, Ed McDonough, Peter Dušek, Julia Nathanson, Jonny Silver, Paul Mitchnick, Lesley Nakonechny, Ashot Harutyunyan, János Lakatos, Andre Conceicao. AND... Change Made with JAYU by Sid Naidu Mattie Gunterman: Playful Pictures by Cassandra Spires Thinking Outside the Cube: SPAO Photo Palk by Alan Bulley Tilly Nelson: Authentic representation by Hazel Love Book recommendations by Alan Bulley Protest is a Creative Act: Resistance and tides of change in Australia. Our cover features a detail from Xavi Bou’s “Ornithography #24.” Yellow-legged gulls at sunset in El Prat de Llobregat, Catalonia. Xavi Bou is represented by The Cardinal Gallery in Toronto. Digital EXTRA Edition A free digital companion edition Check it out - HERE “I love it! It’s a nice, analog way to interact with photography.” Subscribe for delivery Special Offers Digital EXTRA Edition DIGITAL BONUS CONTENT. Flick through our FREE BONUS companion edition. Patreon Perks Advertise With Us Call for Submissions “Subscribing to photoED is such a delight ... not only do we get to see wonderful images in the publication, but we also get great stuff in the mail! It's like a birthday party (without the cake) or Christmas (without the gaudy decorations) 3x/ year!” - Jude from Hamilton What’s on Patreon See the latest news for our community of Patreon supporters Find out more Photo Book Reviews About photoED Photography. EDITORIAL. From emerging artists to established photographers, we share photography stories in a brand new light. Meet The Team Since 2001 photoED magazine has been an inspiration for over 20+ years to photography professionals, students, educators, and enthusiasts alike. With origins in Canada as a grassroots education resource publication, it is now the leading creative content publisher in the editorial photography space in Canada—spanning print, digital, and social media. Jet Tag Safety Reflector Key Chain C$12.00 Price Buy Now Best Value! 6x issue /2 year SUBSCRIPTION C$125.00 Price Buy Now Great Value! 3x issue /SUBSCRIPTION 1 YR C$70.00 Price Buy Now GuruShots Extraordinary Architecture READ MORE HERE ! Widget Didn’t Load Check your internet and refresh this page. If that doesn’t work, contact us.

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