Much in life depends on an openness to what is before us.

The mystic Simone Weil called this attention, and thought of it as a kind of love. The philosopher and novelist Iris Murdoch, who borrowed the word from Weil, described it as “a just and loving gaze directed upon an individual reality.”

As a photographer and a carer for a loved one, I have grown to cherish what Murdoch meant by attention. The wine merchant Joseph Radford puts it like this: “the more present you are, the more detail you notice; the more detail you notice, the more present you become”.

And sometimes, in that kind of looking, something else happens, as the photographer Minor White mentions:

‘When the image mirrors the self
And the self mirrors the subject
Something might take over’

(from Mirrors Messages Manifestations)

That ‘something’ is why I take photographs and why I revisit my own and other people’s. It also underpins many of my encounters with daily living, meeting people, literature, art, philosophy and so on.

The essays and photographs in without force or haste are where I try to draw attention to this ‘something’.