Foreword

FOREWORD BY AUDUN MYSKJA, M.D.

Seminal groundbreaking work

Audun Myskja is the director at the LifeAid Centre for Integrated Medicine, a chief physician, a specialist in general medicine, a fellow in neurological music therapy, a certified Tomatis consultant, an author and a musician who gives talks and training courses extensively both in Norway and abroad. He has published 22 textbooks plus a number of CDs and DVDs containing music and trai- ning for relaxation and health and he has led a number of projects in organizations and municipalities.

Photo: Marte G. Johnsen

Working as a physician for several decades, I have seen a shift in people’s ailments and what they need help with. Today, the line between what is considered to be healthy and sick is more blurred than ever before. Many of the people, objectively speaking, who should be at their physical peak, struggle with a feeling of being overwhelmed. Chronically sick people need knowledge and tools in order to be able to function over time. The common trait among them is that they need help coping with their everyday lives. What can strengthen our experience over time of being able to cope?

Through a number of projects in the health care system utilizing singing, music and dance, I have built up an ever more solid knowledge of how we can use creative forms of expression from within culture to contribute to medical activities. Art is art and medicine is medicine, after all, but there is a large and exciting overlapping area between them that has been opening up more and more in recent years. I have followed art, expressive and visual art therapeutic milieus since the 1980s. They are heavily colored by a expressively pronounced psychological tradition that revolves around expressing feelings that have been locked inside through experiences early in life or negative patterns that have been formed from our lives. The idea behind it is to express them, get them onto paper and let the colors and feelings flow. In this way, one can gain a perspective and resolve fixed negative feelings particularly with the help of a therapist.

What has been lacking in this field has been a more scientifically

objective side to this creative activity. Therefore, this makes the publis- hing of Torkil Færø’s book The Camera Cure® an event. Through the combination of a long career as a doctor treating thousands of patients and a growing business as a photographer, he has the possibility to put together this knowledge in a new way. And he does it fully in this ground- breaking book. As he himself says, “Many of my patients don’t feel too little. On the contrary, they live their lives within inner feelings, locked in inner dialogs where their imaginary problems build up into thoughts and feelings so much so that they aren’t able to get a hold of the real chal- lenges that they face in life.”

The art of photography can take you in a different direction and offer fresh approaches. You become interested in the surrounding world. You find subjects and enter in situations objectively. You can ask yourself: What is important here? What can I capture in this moment? In this way, you can be drawn out of your habitual behavioral patterns and into a precise way of seeing the world. I believe in the old saying ”As above, so below, as inside, so outside”. When we are able to observe the world more precisely, we can then enter into our inner world and understand more of how we function. We can then question what is true, false, constructive and destructive.

This book is full of exercises that constantly weave between develop- ment on the technical level as a photographer and the development of yourself as a person. This intertwining is meaningful. The happiest people that I have met are masters within a subject regardless of what it may be. This includes the internal medicine doctors and surgeons I have sought to emulate, the craftsmen I have met and great musicians. All of them are satisfied on a foundational level and possess a personal integrity not just in their field but also in their relationships. I believe in developing the master within ourselves and to find our focus. As Torkil states, ”photography is one of the most accessible art forms”. Not everyone can learn to play a musical instrument like a master, but everyone can develop the master in himself through meeting the world via a camera lens. This book fills a void both nationally and internationally and will contribute to defining a new direc- tion within the field of culture and health.

FOREWORD BY MORTEN KROGVOLD, PHOTOGRAPHER

Fearless openness and confrontation with habitual thinking

Photo: Trond J. Andersen

Morten Krogvold is a Norwegian photographer, author, speaker and program leader. He is known for his black and white portraits of artists, politicians and other famous personalities in particular, but he also works with nature and older, classical architecture. Morten has published 19 books, has had a number of exhibitions in Norway and abroad and is a popular instructor. He was honored with the decoration Knight First Class in the Royal Norwegian Order of Saint Olav for his overall efforts and dedication to in photography.

situations with seeming fearlessness. He trusts in his life experience and I believe he thinks that if he exudes friendliness, curiosity, a feeling of being secure and openness, then he will receive it back in return. And if that doesn’t work, he will be able to fix that, too! Torkil has seen life’s dark sides as a doctor. Feelings of self-pity and of being defeated due to trivial cirumstances do not apply to Torkil, and after reading this book they shouldn’t apply to any of us.

Torkil and I have a somewhat different approach to organizing work- shops. Torkil wants to travel. I have been to close to 70 countries, but I actually travel mostly in regard to the purposes of the workshop and what will benefit the participants. Torkil wants to get out there; I want to travel inwards. I could certainly have arranged all of the workshops in an apartment block in the most boring place in the world. Nevertheless, we both focus on the mental mindset involved in photography.

The Camera Cure® is about a journey into ourselves! The destination is having a better life through being able to cope with life better. By using the camera as an instrument, we also get better pictures along the way. Torkil Færø conquers our minds, challenges our prejudices and forces us to confront our habitual ways of thinking. And he does it in a friendly but determined way.

I myself tend to take my starting point in the deep history of art and spirituality. Torkil is more of a man of action. That’s why I learn so much reading this book. Torkil and I are on the same wavelength on most things. Much of what I read confirms what I think. Still, I read with concentration, on the subway, the train, in my garden and at my desk, but obviously not in bed. This is not entertainment, although it is exuberant and vital.

And I am learning. This spiritual author conquers my mind. He makes me sharpen my senses. We read. Slowly, my habitual way of looking at things is washed way. My eyes have been cleansed.

As the world-famous war photographer Don McCullin said, “I could have had a worse camera. The pictures would have been the same. Maybe not quite as sharp. But still the same.” The point is that there is always a con- sequence for our thought patterns and actions. This is true whether it is for our pictures or our lives – it isn’t necessarily the price of the equipment that increases or reduces the quality of them. Just as the person behind the camera creates the photos, our thoughts and actions create our ability to deal with life and the quality of our lives.

I’m reading The Camera Cure®. Absent are discussions about tele- photo lenses, pixels and the difference between Nikon and Canon cam- eras. This book is about self-development, one that can be done in several ways. Here, one’s gaze and thoughts – relating to being able to see and understand – are lifted in order to increase one’s quality of life.

I have held over 300 workshops in close to 20 countries. So, I should know something about this! Still, I learn so much when I immerse myself in this book. It has been written by a man who meets life fearlessly and with total openness. Torkil refuses to accept society’s established norms and accepted truths. Instead, he brings forth research-based knowledge that we can all benefit from by incorporating it into our pictures and lives.

Torkil Færø is one of the bravest people I have met, not in macho way, but I have watched him with a camera and seen him seek out people and situations with seeming fearlessness. He trusts in his life experience and I believe he thinks that if he exudes friendliness, curiosity, a feeling of being secure and openness, then he will receive it back in return. And if that doesn’t work, he will be able to fix that, too! Torkil has seen life’s dark sides as a doctor. Feelings of self-pity and of being defeated due to trivial cirumstances do not apply to Torkil, and after reading this book they shouldn’t apply to any of us.

And I am learning. This spiritual author conquers my mind. He makes me sharpen my senses. We read. Slowly, my habitual way of looking at things is washed way. My eyes have been cleansed.

FOREWORD BY TORKIL FÆRØ, M.D AND PHOTOGRAPHER

Photo: Morten Krogvold

Actually, it was a very insignificant moment. I walked home from school, up the path between the apartment buildings where I grew up in Rykkinn. Suddenly it was as if I was struck by lightning. A whole new thought popped into my head: the world is too big and diverse for me to be able to take it all in. I had already lived 10 of the possible 80 years that I had been given on this planet. I wanted to live 10,000 lives and the sorrow of having only one weighed heavily on me. I realized that life is more than just the days that come and go. I had

mother after her son has taken his own life? To tell a father that he has to prepare to die and leave his children behind? To head out to a chaotic car accident where there are several young people who are seriously injured or dead? No, I was mentally prepared for all of this. I tackled these better than that which would become the most mundane challenge for me: How to help people who aren’t actually living their lives.

It was a shock for me to meet all of these patients. Many of them had contracted lifestyle illnesses, physical or mental, that were a consequence of a series of poor choices. What could I actually do for them? Not very much. My bag of tools did not include a proper instrument for these patients.

What shocked me in particular was that very few of these patients would listen to the advice I gave them – advice that both they and I knew would have made them better. Still, they found it easier to just refrain from doing it. That was the easiest thing to do in the moment, but inconvenient over time. Not only did they reject the advice I gave them, they also got angry with me. “Yeah, that is easy for you to say,” they hissed, and with that my advice was deflated. So, what did I do instead? I gave them a pill and maybe a note to have sick leave, increasingly more frustrated by the lack of tools that could have contributed to a positive change in their lives.

I gave up for many years. I wrote prescriptions that, in the best case, managed to lessen some of their discomfort a little, until it hit me: The same types of people who close their ears to advice at the doctor’s office gladly open up their notebooks at photography workshops. And the advice that I give them is for the most part identical!

At the time I had held a large number of workshops in photography. Participants were sent out with their cameras to do what was easy to say but hard to do. Then it occurred to me that the presence, willingness to change and the ability required to take better photos are qualities that are also needed to achieve better health. The solution had literally been right in front of my eyes the whole time: the camera! I could add the camera to my medical bag of tools.

It took me almost 20 years to understand this. But in a flash I had found a calling, a need to contribute to photography being used for something

to grab my life with both hands. Three clear goals appeared in my head:

• To see the whole world
• To understand why people do what they do • To find out how everything fits together

But how can someone live as many lives as possible within this one small one that is available to me? Even though the length of life seemed disappointingly limited, I saw an opportunity to influence and take control over its breadth. Would I be able to press ten lives into one? The revelation that came to me while I was walking on the path gave me the feeling of having been given a task. The course had been set and almost everything I have undertaken since then is in a sense a conse- quence of what happened in that moment. Thousands of times I have repeated these three goals to myself. To see. To understand. To find out.

I chose three methods for achieving these goals – traveling, photo- graphing and becoming a doctor. My backpack, camera and stethoscope have opened doors to otherwise closed places and have given me a wide range of experiences. As a doctor I meet all kinds of people from before they are born and until they die. I often meet them together with their family members so that the causal connections in their lives become clear. As a medical student, I had asked myself the following questions: What is the most difficult thing about being a doctor? Is it to meet a mother after her son has taken his own life? To tell a father that he has to prepare to die and leave his children behind? To head out to a chaotic car accident where there are several young people who are seriously injured or dead? No, I was mentally prepared for all of this. I tackled these better than that which would become the most mundane challenge for me: How to help people who aren’t actually living their lives.

It took me almost 20 years to understand this. But in a flash I had found a calling, a need to contribute to photography being used for something much more important that just taking nice photos. I wanted to initiate patients into the art of photography and simultaneously improve their health, to teach them the art of dealing with the moment.

I have written this book for everyone that struggles with mastering life and can imagine getting better through taking pictures. But you don’t have to be in a bad situation in order to get better through The Camera Cure®. We can all improve. This book is more about how you can develop your character than it is about reducing symptoms. When you become stronger, weaknesses take up less space.

The Camera Cure® is an action-oriented self-help book. It is like a playful obstacle course in which you encounter a series of challenges that you tackle in a lighthearted, easy-going and entertaining way. Photo- graphy should develop the ability to experience, seize and take care of the moment before we study the pictures and see what we can learn from doing that. And when we have learned something then we can change and improve. Even I was a pretty bad photographer the first time I went to a workshop. So, you don’t need to be an expert with cameras to follow along in this book. You don’t even need to have a proper camera, even though having one will give you certain advantages. We live in a time when most people have decent opportunities to take photos on their smart phones and where Instagram pictures have become an art form. Everyone can take pictures, wherever and whenever. No prescription needed.

I have used all of the coping techniques in my own life that I describe in the book. Ever since junior high school, when I was severely bullied, I have worked with being able to tolerate resistance. So if I, who had been weak in these areas for a long time, could learn ways to become strong, then you are certainly capable of it!

Life management begins with a theoretical, abstract process. How- ever, it becomes more tangible and concrete to you if you grab hold of a camera and then go out and play. Then the ability to turn your thoughts and feelings into concrete actions develops. The Camera Cure® is for those of you who wish to accept, explore and improve the life you are already living, or who want to find courage and the power to live the life you dream about deep inside.