The title is a quote from Sexual Personae by Camile Paglia. Most photographers consider the words “natural” and “beauty” constant traveling companions. Its hard to imagine the images of Ansel Adams, Edward Weston, Eliot Porter and other great conservationist photographers as anything other than recorders of natural beauty. Think about this for a minute, however: Is that what they really were?
They all captured a moment in time and manipulated the image in order to create a work of art. They did not simply document nature. Moreover, they chose nature’s best side so to speak. They photographed the Rocky Mountains, Carmel, the Adirondacks, etc.; with rare exception they did not photograph natural disasters, dead children, and the like.
I don’t agree with Professor Paglia entirely, however, because although primal, nature is not a nightmare. I do agree with her that our reaction to it, i.e., the frequently beautiful ideas in our minds and the artifacts we create as a result, are the product of the human imagination, not nature itself.
The problem is that our brains are small and can’t focus on the immense flux of our natural existence so they freeze-frame and name it; once named, it is tamed and reason prevails; secretly, however, we know otherwise:
It is then that genius takes his lamp and lights it. And this dark, solitary, savage bird, this untamable creature, with its gloomy melancholy plumage, opens its throat and begins its song, makes the groves resound and breaks the silence and the darkness of the night.
Diderot, Salon of 1765, as quoted in The Roots of Romanticism, The A.W. Mellon Lectures in Fine Arts given by Isaiah Berlin
Blog No. 64 “Art is Form Struggling to Wake from the Nightmare of Nature”
The title is a quote from Sexual Personae by Camile Paglia. Most photographers consider the words “natural” and “beauty” constant traveling companions. Its hard to imagine the images of Ansel Adams, Edward Weston, Eliot Porter and other great conservationist photographers as anything other than recorders of natural beauty. Think about this for a minute, however: Is that what they really were?
They all captured a moment in time and manipulated the image in order to create a work of art. They did not simply document nature. Moreover, they chose nature’s best side so to speak. They photographed the Rocky Mountains, Carmel, the Adirondacks, etc.; with rare exception they did not photograph natural disasters, dead children, and the like.
I don’t agree with Professor Paglia entirely, however, because although primal, nature is not a nightmare. I do agree with her that our reaction to it, i.e., the frequently beautiful ideas in our minds and the artifacts we create as a result, are the product of the human imagination, not nature itself.
The problem is that our brains are small and can’t focus on the immense flux of our natural existence so they freeze-frame and name it; once named, it is tamed and reason prevails; secretly, however, we know otherwise:
It is then that genius takes his lamp and lights it. And this dark, solitary, savage bird, this untamable creature, with its gloomy melancholy plumage, opens its throat and begins its song, makes the groves resound and breaks the silence and the darkness of the night.
Diderot, Salon of 1765, as quoted in The Roots of Romanticism, The A.W. Mellon Lectures in Fine Arts given by Isaiah Berlin