Creating space by embracing emptiness in your images
Week of 2025-01-11 to 2025-01-17
The photography prompt this week is: Emptiness
Create and share photos inspired by this week's prompt on your Aminus3 website, Substack Notes, or linked in the comments on this post.
Substack community can tag
in your posts.Those of you posting on the Aminus3 community, add tag: #am3-prompt-202503
Be Inspired and Learn Something New
There is that delightful feeling after cleaning out a closet or the garage. For a short time, everything is blissfully empty before filling it again with new things.
This time of year serves a similar role. Come January, people set lofty goals and intentions for the year to come. Perhaps one fallacy is that without clearing out old stuff, it is not so easy to make room for new.
With that in mind, this week we will do a symbolic cleansing by creating images that feature empty space.
Recently
wrote about the Japanese concept of “ma”, and the importance of creative breaks for artistic expression.Ma is a philosophy of emptiness. It is about finding meaning in the empty spaces between things.
We can bring these ideas to our photography utilizing techniques like minimalism and negative space.
Winter is one of my favorite times to create these kind of photos. A new layer of snow provides a fresh surface for simplicity.
You can incorporate emptiness into many different types of images, from landscapes to portraits and more.
Emptiness works as an idea too.
How might you visualize the conceptual qualities of emptiness in a photo?
You could explore ideas around loneliness and loss, or more simply, the feeling of vacant places.
Give it some thought and make some photos.
After you’ve created some empty imagery, you might even set a goal or two for the year to come.
Last Week’s Prompt Photos for “Triangles”
We spent last week teetering between a state of imbalance and perfect symmetry as triangles from every corner of the world revealed themselves.
The adage that once you go looking for triangles, you find them everywhere, seemed to be a guiding principle.
See all the photos shared on Aminus3 for last week’s Triangles prompt.
Substack photos shared from
(above), with additional photos from (photo link), (photo link), (photo link), and (photo link).
Your topic "emptiness" has (finally) persuaded me to join the group. My first image is published, I think. ( link: https://ludwig.aminus3.com/image/2025-01-15.html )
I just recalled, a reference to emptiness as a design concept comes from Kenya Hara, who was the chief designer of the Muji brand.
I read an interview of him years ago and it's stuck with me ever since. I use it in my own writing to talk about how inertia existing within whatever we are currently doing and how we have to step away from it to make space for newness.
Many articles available online talking about his theories on emptiness. Highly suggest searching for some.