David J. Bookbinder was born in Buffalo, New York, in 1951. At age 6, inspired by the launching of Sputnik, he imagined himself a future space scientist. He started photographing in high school where, as yearbook editor, he took most of the candid pictures.
After college, he moved to New York City. There, for several years, he did black-and-white street photography, took pictures of musicians for a book he wrote on American folk music, shot an occasional record album cover, and worked part-time as a photojournalist.
In 2001, after a 20-year hiatus, Bookbinder bought a digital camera and started shooting again. The shift from straight black-and-white, wet-chemistry photography to shooting in color and manipulating images on a computer was literally an eye-opener. Bookbinder still takes pictures of street life, nature, and people, but his current preoccupation is with transforming photographs of flowers, stone, metal, wood, and the sky into mandala-like images.
Bookbinder's early influences included Walker Evans and Diane Arbus. The present work is inspired by the paintings of Georgia O'Keeffe, the nature photographs of Andreas Feininger, and the flower images of Harold Feinstein, with whom Bookbinder briefly studied.
Bookbinder lives north of Boston, MA. He works as a psychotherapist, primarily with artists and people with addictive behaviors. He is the author of four non-fiction books and is currently writing a memoir of the aftermath of a near-death experience.
artists' statement
My personal motivation in creating these images was to heal from a decade of physical and emotional trauma, the consequence of a near-fatal event in Albany, New York, in 1993. I began this project shortly after I bought my first digital camera and found myself shooting patterns of color and light, rather than the people and buildings I had shot in my black-and-white days. I learned to manipulate the images, hoping at first merely to improve them, but soon realizing that once an image file was on my hard drive, I could do anything I wanted with it. The experience of creating these mandalas is reminiscent of meditation.
My choice of the hexagram (the Star of David, "beloved" in Hebrew) as the organizing shape for these mandalas was subconscious, but I believe this choice was no accident. In many traditions, the Star of David, composed of two overlapping triangles, represents the reconciliation of opposites — male/female, fire/water, and so on. Their combination symbolizes unity and harmony. Listening to what the mandalas were telling me led me out of a dark place and, indirectly, to my decision to become a psychotherapist.
Carl Jung, one of the fathers of modern psychology, believed mandalas are a pathway to the essential Self and used them in his own personal transformation. In a small way, as both mandala artist and psychotherapist, I carry on Jung's tradition. I display several of the flower mandalas in my treatment room, and from time to time they become part of discussions with clients. The combination of natural elements and digital manipulation seems both to stimulate and to relax them.
The current selection is part of a book-in-progress that pairs images with inspirational quotations such that each image-and-quote pair resonates with a fundamental aspect of human experience.
I hope publication of these images will further the process of harnessing the power of the mandala to heal.
