“The Photographs I Love" 11 — Jodi Cobb

Jodi Cobb. Jogyesa Temple, Seoul.

 

“It's in those moments that you remember why you chose journalism:
change the world, even if only in a small part, by casting a light in its darkest corners.”
(Jodi Cobb)

With my great pleasure I am going back to talking about photography, in particular I continue the series of photographs that I love most, with a new series of ten.

In this case, they will often be truly individual photographs, of which authors I may know little or nothing.

Let's start this time with a woman: Jodi Cobb.

She also, like Mary Ellen Mark, an unstoppable, stubborn woman with a great ability to achieve her goals, even when they seemed impossible to achieve.

 

Born in the United States, she spent her entire childhood abroad, collecting as many as 28 different addresses around the world and a five-year stay in Iran, where her father worked for a Texas oil company. At 12 she had already traveled the world twice.

Passionate about photography since the days of the faculty of Journalism in Missouri, however, she chose a career as a writer for a gardening magazine in New York.

But her love of photography did not leave her and a year later she enrolled in a masters in photography in Missouri. She later worked for the News Journal in Wilmington, Delaware, where she was the only female photojournalist, and for the Denver Post, taking on any assignments the editors gave her, from music to sports.

“I had to prove that I knew how to do everything, otherwise they would have said that this was not a job for women.”

The turning point came when she tried to enter National Geographic. After a long series of test assignments, Cobb was able to be hired by the magazine in 1977, the only woman photographer in the editorial.

 

 

She traveled for work to 60 countries.

Cobb was one of the first to cross China, as a photographer, when it reopened to the West, covering 7,000 miles (11,000 kilometers) in two months for the book “Journey into China”. She was the first photographer to enter the hidden life of Saudi Arabian women, welcomed into princess palaces and Bedouin tents for an important article in 1987. And she was the first woman to be named White House Photographer of the Year. .

And, perhaps her most famous work, she was the only female photographer to enter the Geishas' homes in Japan in 1994, during her sabbatical.

“Gaining the trust of a geisha was difficult. No photographer had ever been allowed into the privacy of the geisha house and the women were very suspicious. So I decided to settle in Kyoto for a while and showed up at their door every day until they got used to my presence. […] When I gained their trust, it was like a dam exploded,” Cobb says.

From that trip the book “Geisha: The Life, The Voices, the Art” was born, which earned her awards and international recognition.

I believe that more than half of published novels starring geishas use her photographs as a cover.

 

Jodi Cobb. “Geisha”

But her photography that fascinates me most has nothing to do with China or Japan, but we are in Korea. In Seoul, precisely. 

This is a photograph that all the students of my courses, or of the class on the Masters of Photography, know well. Because it has different levels of reading. 

In the first place, it must be understood. I usually start by asking to read the image, what do they see... What does it represent? 

And I assure you that there is rarely anyone who gets there without some suggestions. It's a mysterious, evocative photo. You have to get inside.

Jodi Cobb was wonderful in the way she centered the reflected face of the Buddha mask, in the windowpane, precisely in the tree trunk: only by exploiting the dark background of the tree the reflection of the mask is intelligible, clear.

We are nose to the window, at her side, looking out of the temple and the face of Buddha appears to us in the reflection. If it had been in the emptiness of the sky it would have been lost, the light colors would have mixed and the face would not have stood out in its gold as in the black trunk.

 

But this photograph is not only exceptional in its making. 

But now we have to take a step back in time, and not just a little.

Exactly in 530 BC, when at 35 years old, after years of meditation and travel, Siddhartha Gautama – better known as Gautama Buddha – reached the Indian city of Bodh Gaya, in the federal state of Bihar, and after seven weeks of deep uninterrupted meditation, in one full moon night in May, he sat cross-legged under a fig tree in the lotus position: in this position he meditated for a whole night until he reached the perfect illumination of Nirvāṇa.

“The Buddha achieved, through meditation, ever-greater levels of awareness: he grasped the knowledge of the Four Noble Truths and the Eightfold Path and at that point lived the Great Enlightenment, which freed him forever from the cycle of rebirth (not to be confused with the Hindu doctrine of reincarnation, which was explicitly rejected with the doctrine of the “not-self”, anātman).

The first week after enlightenment Gautama Buddha remained in meditation under the Ficus medica. Another three weeks he spent meditating under three other trees: the first under an ajapāla (Ficus benghalensis or Ficus indica), the second under a mucalinda (Sanskrit: mucilinda; Barringtonia acutangula), the third under a rājāyatana (Buchanania latifolia).”

 

In this way the life of the Buddha is narrated.

I don't know how many of you are like me, but when I was a teenager there was no birthday without Herman Hesse's book “Siddhartha” is given as a gift. Truly a classic.

My copy was also a gift from a high school girl.

Therefore, since I was a boy, even before deepening my studies on the various religions by reading books and looking at photographs, everything was well defined in my imagination.

Then, came the books of Aśvaghoṣa and other texts on Buddhism.

 

Jodi Cobb. “Bedouin woman, Riyadh”

 

All this makes this photograph incredible, and I think it's one of the most powerful of the hundreds taken related to Buddhism, because in a simple shot there is the whole story of this powerful mystical thought.

This is what I then tried to explain this photo: each image has various levels of interpretation, starting from the superficial one of aesthetics, of what it represents and how. Then, it goes down to a deeper level, that of symbolism. But this level can only be accessed if you have certain notions.

It's no coincidence that Cobb centered Buddha's face in the trunk of the tree, both for the technical expedient of making it visible, but also because Gautama Buddha achieved enlightenment sitting under a tree.

It's a fundamental part of those who believe in Buddhism.

 

Knowledge loads this image with incredible power, albeit all in a seemingly simple way, just as was the Buddha's enlightenment.

Sometimes, the photographs are windows open onto long paths and full of richness. There is much more to it than what we simply see.

“Insight” in psychology is called the concept of “intuition”, in the immediate and sudden form. You look at something, for a long time, and then everything becomes clear, it “lights up”, you access the Nirvāṇa of its meaning and its beauty.

 

This is a photograph that I never tire of looking at.

And when young students ask me what is the use of reading so many books, poetry or literature, to appreciate a good photograph, I reply that if I was able to sweetly enjoy this image of Jodi Cobb, it is also thanks to Herman Hesse's masterpiece.

 

We only see the tree on the surface, but we must also learn to be able to see the web of roots under the ground.

 

Jodi Cobb. "Mumbai Street, India."

READ ALSO:

• Siamese Twins 
• “The Photographs I Love” 6 – Mary Ellen Mark 

Jodi Cobb Website: https://www.jodicobb.com/index
“Jodi Cobb - The Great Photographers” (National Geographic, 2010)
Herman Hesse: “Siddhartha” (Adelphi, 1990)
Aśvaghoṣa: “The deeds of the Buddha” (Adelphi, 2000)

Italian version