Impressionism and Impermanence

Impressionist photography begins with one certainty: everything in front of the lens is already changing. Light fades, reflections shift, and outlines dissolve before the shutter clicks. This approach does not aim to freeze time. It invites us to observe how it moves and to find beauty in that transformation.

Embracing the Ephemeral in Impressionist Photography

Impressionism, whether on canvas or sensor, is less a style than a way of noticing. Light drifts across water, wind shifts a figure’s outline, clouds redraw the ground with moving shadows. A photograph taken in this spirit is not a freeze-frame of perfection but evidence of a living instant. Roland Barthes wrote that a photograph proves “this has been.” For impressionist work, the claim is stronger: it proves “this was passing.”

Impermanence : From Philosophy to Photography

More than two thousand years ago, the Greek philosopher Heraclitus taught a lesson about change. The line often quoted today, “no one steps into the same river twice”, is preserved by Plato in the dialogue Cratylus 402a. Heraclitus’s own fragment reads: “For those who step into the same rivers, other and still other waters flow” (DK 22B12). Although the river keeps its name, the water never stops changing. His insight ties identity to transformation: what seems stable is always in motion.
Across civilisations the same lesson reappears: the world is never fixed; it shifts, moves, and evolves, often without notice.
To photograph in an impressionist spirit is to cooperate with that flow, not to stop time but to greet it; the fading light, a shape dissolving, a reflection slipping away. Each frame welcomes the moment for what it is becoming.

Asian Views on Impermanence : From Vô Thường to Wabi-Sabi

In Vietnam, the phrase vô thường, “nothing lasts”, is seen on temple gates, Tết banners, and meditation calligraphy. Zen master Thích Nhất Hạnh (1926 to 2022) turned the phrase into daily practice; his one-breath ink drawings of the word invite mindfulness and remind us that seeing change clearly softens attachment and nurtures calm.

“Thanks to impermanence, everything is possible.” — Thích Nhất Hạnh, No Death, No Fear

In Buddhism this insight is formalised as anicca, impermanence, which stands with dukkha and anattā as the three marks of existence.
Japan offers a sister perspective in wabi-sabi, an aesthetic that finds beauty in what is incomplete, weathered, and irregular.
Applied to photography, these views favour presence over control: the aim is not to pin something down but to respond to what appears, knowing it will soon pass.

Reflections on the Shore: Cycles of Disappearance and Return

At dawn on Central-Vietnam beaches, wet sand becomes a mirror. A wave sweeps in, erasing the sky it reflects. As the water retreats, the mirror reforms for a handful of seconds, long enough to register silhouettes that grow, shrink, then melt. Low sun stretches these reflections so that ocean and sky appear to trade places. Each exposure records one turn of that cycle.

Letting the Scene Appear

I usually reach the coast an hour before first light, walk the tidal line, and note where the next wave will skim the sand. I move no objects and add no artificial light. The beach acts like a slate that each wave wipes clean. Inland, flooded rice fields near Hội An offer a similar classroom: clouds travel across parallel paddies, turning rows into mirrors. I watch, wait for one edge of cloud to align, and take a single frame. Repetition reveals timing. Timing reveals the moment worth keeping.

A Lineage of Impermanent Images: Monet, Davison, Puyo

Long before the first camera, Claude Monet turned his Giverny pond into a study of impermanence. He painted the same lilies and the same reflections at different times of day and in changing seasons. What interested him was not the subject itself, but how light transformed it. Water mirrored the sky, wind softened outlines, and no two views were ever the same. He made change visible through repetition.

Later, British photographer George Davison introduced this vision into photography. In his 1889 lecture “Impressionism,” he encouraged photographers to capture the impression of a moment rather than technical detail. He valued softness and mood over accuracy, inviting a more personal way of seeing.

In France, Constant Puyo and the pictorialists deepened this approach. They worked with blurred focus, layered negatives, and alternative printing methods to express atmosphere and motion. Their goal was not realism. It was to reflect how the eye feels change, not how the lens measures it. These choices helped open photography to subjectivity and emotion.

Today, digital tools let us work faster, but the impulse remains the same. Impressionist photography is not about fixing the world in place. It is about responding to how it shifts, second by second.

Vietnam: A Living Classroom of Impermanence

Life in Hội An reinforces these lessons. Each rainy season, the town’s old quarter floods. Streets become canals, then dry out within a day. Market stalls are dismantled, rebuilt, and re-arranged according to current and weather. Photographing these shifts means watching how a façade’s reflection doubles in height during the flood, then disappears as water drains. The subject is less the architecture than the brief conversation between building and water.

An Impressionist Photograph: A Moment Offered

Each finished image is an invitation. It asks viewers to notice micro-changes that build larger ones: the two-inch retreat of a tide, the slide of a shadow on a wall, the way haze lifts to reveal a ridge. The spiritual lesson is direct: nothing in the frame is permanent, yet the act of noticing can be. When we pay attention, art and life meet in the same second.

See the full article about my impressionist approach

Sources

• 1. Barthes, Roland. Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography. Translated by Richard Howard. Hill and Wang, 1981.
  2. Thích Nhất Hạnh. The Art of Living: Peace and Freedom in the Here and Now. HarperOne, 2017.
  3. Heraclitus. Fragments. Translated and edited by T.M. Robinson. University of Toronto Press, 1987.