After a 4 year hiatus, we are back with the 7Lenses – Quarantine Edition. From April 6 – May 25, 2020, we’ll post a photo challenge on this blog every Monday followed by the posting of our photographic interpretations of this theme throughout the week with a Sunday deadline. You can follow along here or join us in the challenge by posting with us on Instagram using the hashtag: #7Lenses. For this 8-week edition, we’ll follow the School of Life’s 8 Consoling Virtues as the guide for each of the challenges.
Every Monday, I’ll unpack the specific consoling virtue with more detail and depth. Below is a very brief overview of the 8 Consoling Virtues:
Week One – Brokenness: Under this theme will sit photography that could help to reconcile us with our broken and imperfect nature, which would liberate us from the folly of perfectionism and render it safer to share our vulnerabilities with others. Goal is to feel less alone in our vulnerabilities.
Week Two – Melancholia Universalis: Under this theme would come photography that sombrely acknowledged how much we have to be sad about and could thereby attenuate our anger and disappointment at the frequently disappointing nature of reality. Photos will show that we have not been damned, we are simply experiencing part of the accidents and sorrows that come with being alive.
Week Three – Dependence: Photography in this theme would highlight how much we owe to others and continue to need the support and reassurance we relied on when we were younger. These photos will rehabilitate the idea of dependence.
Week Four – Ordinary Life: Photos under this theme would assuage our feelings that life is somehow always elsewhere, and that glamour and importance reside where we are not. Goal of these photos would be to enhance the prestige of ordinary life.
Week Five – Tragedy: Photographs from this theme would remind us of how easy it is for more or less good people to make small errors that end up unleashing catastrophe. Tragic art helps to remind us of how much compassion is required in order for a society to function humanely.
Week Six – Transcendence: Works in this theme would draw us away from our more petty and egoistic concerns and remind us — in a kind and redemptive way — of our insignificance and puniness in the wider world.
Week Seven – Good Enough: These photographs counterbalance Romanticism and propose that romance has been the enemy of our capacity to succeed at relationships and that love is, first and foremost, a skill to be learned, not an emotion to be felt. Goal is to show not romantic love but good enough love.
Week Eight – Recurrence: These photographs would pull us away from our concerns with what is novel and over-stressed by the medium we tellingly call ‘the news’. Photos here would balance us inwardly through exposure to what is ancient, recurring and cyclical. And will offer a perspective of inner calm and maturity.
* Words above changed just a little bit to fit our needs from Chapter 6 – Art in “A Replacement for Religion” by The School of Life.
Meet the Lenses:
Sam DuRegger
Sam is a builder of things, who currently lives in OKC with his wife, four daughters, and their unruly weimaraner, Ouray. He ♥’s coffee & tea.
Nate Friend
Nate can be found living and working on a plethora of things in Northwest Arkansas. He is passionate about all things coffee, photos, and connecting with human beings. And can also fill out his bio more if he wants….
Don Hogan
Don is a professional haver funner who needs to finish out this bio…. seriously.
