05/01/2026
Silent Creativity https://blueplanetphoto.com/blog/2026/04/30/silent-creativity Silent Creativity Silence. Stillness. Solitude.
It was later in high school when I started to think more seriously about photography, despite having a darkroom in my basement since 9th grade. I wanted to shoot medium or large format, but didn’t have the funds for either camera or film, chemistry, additional darkroom equipment, etc. So, I taught myself to photograph with a 35mm camera as if it was large format. That meant, slower, deliberate compositions, not “motor-driving” through film, literally and figuratively. It required a different mindset and awareness; more consciously observant, less reaction and more preparation. I could still shoot more exposures than possible with large format, but after some practice I was “wasting” less money on film and processing for a greater ratio of keepers. And slow generally means quiet, patient and, depending on the subject, relatively still.
These days, when I’m out photographing I’m usually alone, or end up solitary if with a group (like many photographers). I’m all in. Talking distracts and takes me out of the mode, and definitely out of the Zone when I’m in it. I prefer the relative external silence of solitude, which also inspires internal silence, or stillness. Even if I don’t happen to make any photographs, photographing is a meditative practice for me; a calming, centering activity. But, according to research I’m in the minority.
Some people, many it turns out, fear silence. The phobia is called sedatephobia and those who suffer from it experience anxiety, distress, even physical symptoms like heart palpitations and nausea. People with this fear feel a desperate need for constant sound, in whatever form, to avoid the emptiness of a quiet environment and exposure to the thoughts of our inner world. To sedatephobians, in our hyperconnected, overstimulated world, silence is discomforting, disorienting, distracting. Silence is a threat.
A smaller percentage of people enjoy silence. The love of silence, stillness, solitude, is called by several terms; eremophilia, aphonophilia, sigophilia, isophilia, and others. In some cultures and practices, long periods of silence, either sitting still or while performing regular daily activities, is used to focus and center the mind. For absolute silence, have a sit in an anechoic chamber. Anechoic means free from echo and an anechoic chamber is built with specialized materials to completely absorb sound. The anechoic chamber at Orfield Laboratories in Minneapolis, holds the record as the quietest place on Earth, absorbing 99.99% of sound, resulting in sound recordings of -24.9 dB (decibels. The average sound level of daily life is 60-70 dB, 512 times louder than inside the chamber. A quiet forest or remote desert is 0-20 dB, about 32 times louder). It’s so quiet, a person can hear their eyes blink and blood moving through their veins. The world record for time spent in an anechoic chamber is 1 hour 26 minutes. The closest I’ve come to experiencing an anechoic chamber is in Carlsbad Caverns, New Mexico. I spent 5 hours in the cave, much of it nearly alone. At one point my camera was making a noise I hadn’t heard before and I wondered if it was going to fail. After some inspection I realized I was hearing the internal motion stabilization mechanism that is so quiet under normal circumstances you never hear it. I could hear people walking 100 yards away and talking much farther than that.
Silence is both a condition of the external and internal environment and includes such experiences as stillness and solitude. Stillness can refer to the state of the body or the mind, or both. It is a calmness, an emptiness and focus of mind that dismisses or places a bubble around disruptive thoughts and fears. The mind can be still, too, even if there is chaos surrounding you. Stillness requires practice.
Solitude is typically a physical condition of being by yourself and can be positive and negative experiences; being alone versus being lonely. Being alone, or solitary, is an experience without distraction, without others demanding your attention, without unnecessary noise like the TV, telephone, or demands to complete tasks like laundry, mowing the lawn, or grocery shopping. You are in control of your own time. Loneliness is an emotional experience of loss, of not belonging, being left out, and is usually not a beneficial aspect of silence or stillness.
Part of the reason for wanting stillness, a quiet mind, is because our brain can only process a relatively small amount of data at a time. In the 1990s, Mihalyi Csikszentmihalyi determined the brain can cognitively, consciously, process about 126 bits of information per second. That’s for being aware of things like spoken words, music, details of the environment, activities around you, colors, odors, other environmental sounds, etc. He determined, experimentally, that it takes roughly 40 bits/second to co…
Silence. Stillness. Solitude. It was later in high school when I started to think more seriously about photography, despite having a darkroom in my basement since 9th grade. I wanted to shoot medium or large format, but didn’t have the funds for either camera or film, chemistry, additional darkroo...
