When speaking of Minor White, John Szarkowski noted in his wonderful book, Looking at Photographs, that:
As a rule, photography has not been especially generous to those of her followers possessed by the romantic imagination, but every student of the medium will have his own considerable list of conspicuous exceptions. The romantic temper is distinguished by its quickness to find universal meanings in specific facts….It is one thing to write about seeing the world in a grain of sand, and eternity in a flower, etc., and another thing to make a convincing picture of the idea. Photography especially has generally worked best when it tried to discover the differences between the world and a grain of sand, rather than belabor their similarities.
I confess that I have what John Szarkowski calls a romantic imagination. The “universal meaning” we are quick to seek and frequently find falls under the broad term “beauty.” In Blog No. 28 I mentioned John Armstrong’s wonderful book dealing with the subject of beauty, let me now mention another wonderful book entitled Beauty in Photography by Robert Adams because it discusses beauty in the context of photography and universal meaning. He opines that the proper goal of art is beauty and then states that the “beauty” that concerns him is that of Form (he capitalizes the word). He asks and answers: “Why is Form beautiful? Because, I think, it helps us meet our worst fear, the suspicion that life may be chaos and that therefore our suffering is without meaning.” He continues:
William Carlos Williams said that poets write for a single reason—to give witness to splendor (a word also used by Thomas Aquinas in defining the beautiful). It is a useful word, especially for a photographer because it implies light—light of overwhelming intensity. The Form toward which art points is of an incontrovertible brilliance, but it is also far too intense to examine directly. We are compelled to understand Form by its fragmentary reflection in the daily objects around us; art will never fully define light. [emphasis in the original]
Mr. Adams then elaborates that art simplifies forms that it finds in specific, concrete, real-world examples, and that this is especially true of photographic art. Thus, photographic art necessarily concerns itself with a simplification of the real world through composition and is therefore built not out of the general, as is philosophy, but out of the specific and the real. He concludes this thought:
If the goal of art is Beauty and if we assume that the goal is sometimes reached, even if always imperfectly, how do we judge art? Basically, I think, by whether it reveals to us important Form that we ourselves have experienced but to which we have not paid adequate attention. Successful art rediscovers Beauty for us [emphasis in original].
This conclusion is similar to that of the ancient Greek philosopher Plotinus who created an entire metaphysics/religion in The Six Enneads to be able to express what he experienced when confronted with beauty. He was a Neoplatonist, imagining that man was an angel who had fallen to earth and that when he awoke he was stuck in the material world and suffered amnesia. He thought that deep within ourselves we knew this fact; that when we experienced a beautiful thing we were reminded of our home; that when we experienced a beautiful person we were reminded of who we really were. Whether one accepts Plotinus’ metaphysics/religious views or not, as an allegory it describes the experience of beauty as something otherworldly and is very close to Wordsworth’s perspective in a poem quoted in Blog No. 15, “Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood.”
The fact that photography is necessarily restricted to reality, unlike painting, sculpture or music, is its power, not its limitation. If an artist paints, sculpts or composes something it reflects his or her fancy to a great degree, but photography speaks to truth and cannot escape being tethered to the truth of reality. Thus, when a photographic artist simplifies, he uncovers what lies hidden in reality. This process is difficult, for me at least, because it takes imagination of the highest order to see it: as a man is, so he sees.
No. 30: The Romantic Imagination
When speaking of Minor White, John Szarkowski noted in his wonderful book, Looking at Photographs, that:
As a rule, photography has not been especially generous to those of her followers possessed by the romantic imagination, but every student of the medium will have his own considerable list of conspicuous exceptions. The romantic temper is distinguished by its quickness to find universal meanings in specific facts….It is one thing to write about seeing the world in a grain of sand, and eternity in a flower, etc., and another thing to make a convincing picture of the idea. Photography especially has generally worked best when it tried to discover the differences between the world and a grain of sand, rather than belabor their similarities.
I confess that I have what John Szarkowski calls a romantic imagination. The “universal meaning” we are quick to seek and frequently find falls under the broad term “beauty.” In Blog No. 28 I mentioned John Armstrong’s wonderful book dealing with the subject of beauty, let me now mention another wonderful book entitled Beauty in Photography by Robert Adams because it discusses beauty in the context of photography and universal meaning. He opines that the proper goal of art is beauty and then states that the “beauty” that concerns him is that of Form (he capitalizes the word). He asks and answers: “Why is Form beautiful? Because, I think, it helps us meet our worst fear, the suspicion that life may be chaos and that therefore our suffering is without meaning.” He continues:
William Carlos Williams said that poets write for a single reason—to give witness to splendor (a word also used by Thomas Aquinas in defining the beautiful). It is a useful word, especially for a photographer because it implies light—light of overwhelming intensity. The Form toward which art points is of an incontrovertible brilliance, but it is also far too intense to examine directly. We are compelled to understand Form by its fragmentary reflection in the daily objects around us; art will never fully define light. [emphasis in the original]
Mr. Adams then elaborates that art simplifies forms that it finds in specific, concrete, real-world examples, and that this is especially true of photographic art. Thus, photographic art necessarily concerns itself with a simplification of the real world through composition and is therefore built not out of the general, as is philosophy, but out of the specific and the real. He concludes this thought:
If the goal of art is Beauty and if we assume that the goal is sometimes reached, even if always imperfectly, how do we judge art? Basically, I think, by whether it reveals to us important Form that we ourselves have experienced but to which we have not paid adequate attention. Successful art rediscovers Beauty for us [emphasis in original].
This conclusion is similar to that of the ancient Greek philosopher Plotinus who created an entire metaphysics/religion in The Six Enneads to be able to express what he experienced when confronted with beauty. He was a Neoplatonist, imagining that man was an angel who had fallen to earth and that when he awoke he was stuck in the material world and suffered amnesia. He thought that deep within ourselves we knew this fact; that when we experienced a beautiful thing we were reminded of our home; that when we experienced a beautiful person we were reminded of who we really were. Whether one accepts Plotinus’ metaphysics/religious views or not, as an allegory it describes the experience of beauty as something otherworldly and is very close to Wordsworth’s perspective in a poem quoted in Blog No. 15, “Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood.”
The fact that photography is necessarily restricted to reality, unlike painting, sculpture or music, is its power, not its limitation. If an artist paints, sculpts or composes something it reflects his or her fancy to a great degree, but photography speaks to truth and cannot escape being tethered to the truth of reality. Thus, when a photographic artist simplifies, he uncovers what lies hidden in reality. This process is difficult, for me at least, because it takes imagination of the highest order to see it: as a man is, so he sees.