Zemni Photography Blog

Photography projects, inspiration and research by Linda Mayoux

The Beautiful and the Sublime

Category: Beauty and Sublime

  • The Beautiful and the Sublime

    “The Sublime” radio 4 podcast In our time

    Concepts of beauty

    “Beauty and art were once thought of as belonging together, with beauty as among art’s principle aims and art as beauty’s highest calling” Beech 2009 p12

    “Why is form beautiful? Because, I think, it helps us meet our worst fear, the suspicion that life mat be chaos and that therefore our suffering is without meaning” Adams 1996 p25

    “The passion caused by the great and sublime in nature, when those causes operate most powerfully, is Astonishment; and astonishment is that state of the soul, in which all its motions are suspended, with some degree of horror. In this case, the mind is so entirely filled with its object, that it cannot entertain any other, nor by consequence reason on that object which employs it.” Edmund Burke 1757.

    Beauty is very much an aspect of aesthetics or more simply our ‘senses’; sensuous music and sounds, textiles and textures, pleasant flavours and smells. There are essentially two perspectives:

    1) beauty as  ‘objective’ universal within human nature. Mathematical and geometric evaluations of pieces of music, human features and pictorial composition have been used to support this view.

    2) beauty as subjective ‘taste’  ‘beauty lies in the eye of the beholder’. As personal and/or a matter of cultural identity, what is beautiful to one group of people may be vulgar and repulsive to another.

    Claude Lorrain (1600–1682), was regarded as the antithesis of sublime since it exemplified classical beauty through its formal harmony, elegance and subtle luminosity.

    Modernist debates and Marxist critiques of beauty have made it a political matter – a bourgeois preoccupation and tool of repression.

    Dadaists Otto Dix (1891-1969) satirised images of conventional, romantic notions of beauty and fascist ideals of perfection in his politically challenging paintings made around the dawn of the Second World War.

    Conceptual artist Marcel Duchamp‘s urinal placed in gallery context.

     Concepts of the sublime

     “the sublime is associated with awe, danger and pain, with places where accidents happen, where things run beyond human control, where nature is untameable.”
    Liz Wells

     Longinus (c300AD) passage about poetry and rhetoric in ‘The True Sublime’ in Book 7 of the Peri Hypsous: For by some innate power the true sublime uplifts our souls; we are filled with a proud exaltation and a sense of vaunting joy; just as though we had ourselves produced what we had heard.

    Kant, Hegel, johann sciller.

    Etymology: 1580s, “expressing lofty ideas in an elevated manner,” from Middle French sublime (15c.), or directly from Latin sublimis “uplifted, high, borne aloft, lofty, exalted, eminent, distinguished,” possibly originally “sloping up to the lintel,” from sub “up to” + limen “lintel, threshold, sill” (see limit (n.)). The sublime (n.) “the sublime part of anything, that which is stately or imposing” is from 1670s.

    British Art and the Sublime Christine Riding and Nigel Llewellyn

    The English word derives from a conjunction of two Latin terms, the preposition sub, meaning below or up to and the noun limen, meaning limit, boundary or threshold. Limen is also the word for ‘lintel’, the heavy wooden or stone beam that holds the weight of a wall up above a doorway or a window. This sense of not only striving or pushing upwards but also against an overbearing force is an important connotation for the word sublime. By the seventeenth century, the word in English was in use both as an adjective and as a noun (the sublime) with many shades of meaning but invariably referring to things that are raised aloft, set high up and exalted, whether they be buildings, ideas, people, language, style or other aspects of or responses to art and nature.
    By about 1700 an additional theme started to develop, which was that the sublime in writing, nature, art or human conduct was regarded as of such exalted status that it was beyond normal experience, perhaps even beyond the reach of human understanding. In its greatness or intensity and whether physical, metaphysical, moral, aesthetic or spiritual, by the time of the Enlightenment, the sublime was generally regarded as beyond comprehension and beyond measurement.

    Edmund Burke’s A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful, published in 1757 broke the idea of the sublime down into seven aspects, all of which Burke argued were discernible in the natural world and in natural phenomena:

    • Darkness – which constrains the sense of sight (primary among the five senses)
    • Obscurity – which confuses judgement
    • Privation (or deprivation) – since pain is more powerful than pleasure
    • Vastness – which is beyond comprehension
    • Magnificence – in the face of which we are in awe
    • Loudness – which overwhelms us
    • Suddenness – which shocks our sensibilities to the point of disablement
    The ‘romantic sublime’ was a particularly common theme throughout 18th and 19th century painting with religious and spiritual overtones. Sublime was a term that was used in art writing alongside adjectives such as ‘awful’, ‘dreadful’ and ‘terrible’, which today tend simply to denote ‘less than ideal’ but which in the 1700s were understood explicitly as expressions of awe, dread and terror, and were associated with the sublime as standard elements in aesthetic discourse. Sublime landscape painters, especially in the Romantic period, around 1800, tended to take subjects such as towering mountain ranges, deep chasms, violent storms, rough seas, volcanic eruptions or avalanches that, if actually experienced, would be dangerous and even life-threatening.


    John Martin

    JMW Turner

    Caspar David Friedrich Wanderer above the sea of the fog / above the mist 1818 

    James Ward:  Gordale Scar 1812-1814

    Sigmund Freud (1856-1939) defines the sublime as not just an aspect of aesthetics, but of psychoanalysis. He related it to his idea of ‘the uncanny’ which refers to a feeling of discomfort when seeing something that is simultaneously familiar and alien. ‘Das Unheimliche’ not just in terms of location, but in terms of identity. The un-settlement, or cognitive dissonance that can result from an encounter with the uncanny is what can stir the sense of the sublime.

    So becomes something that occupies the imagination. Something that triggers a psychoactive response in an individual.

    Philip Shaw ‘Modernism and the Sublime’

    Lucio Fontana (1950s) punched holes (or buchi) through his canvases, the aim being literally to break through the surface of the work so that the viewer can perceive the space that lies beyond. Fontana regarded this gesture as a means of disclosing the unlimited space of the sublime, announcing ‘I have created an infinite dimension’. In some works slashes executed with a razor seem to erupt outwards, conveying the force of the original assault towards the viewer in a way that is both energetic and terrifying.

    Mark Rothko   Robert Rosenblum in‘The Abstract Sublime’ (1961) writes: ‘the floating, horizontal tiers of veiled light in the Rothko seem to conceal a total, remote presence that we can only intuit and never fully grasp. These infinite, glowing voids carry us beyond reason to the Sublime; we can only submit to them in an act of faith and let ourselves be absorbed into their radiant depths’. Rothko’s biographer James Breslin writes: ‘Rothko … constantly felt the imminent danger of being ‘smothered’ by encroaching physical, social, or domestic circumstances. His new paintings created a breathing space. Yet these paintings do not seek simply to ‘transcend’ the walls of an unalterable external reality by soaring upward into either an untrammelled freedom or a vaporous mysticism. Rather, by (in Rothko’s words) pulverising the verge of dissolution – his works free us from the weight, solidity, and definition of a material existence, whose constricting pressures we still feel. Rothko combines freedom and constraint and if these paintings create ‘dramas’ with the shapes as the ‘performers’ they stage a struggle to be free.’

    “in many cultures, a confrontation of the sublime is a requisite rite of passage. Within my project, Threshold Zone (2008) I explored and attempted to rationalise my own response to both man-made and naturally formed underground spaces. I felt curious, and was determined to make some work in these spaces, but I was also acutely phobic of being underground, particularly when working alone. These spaces were generally physically unfamiliar to me, yet my mind was filled with familiar fairytales and contemporary narratives relating to the dangers that lurk below ground in the darkness. I channelled these feelings into a creative strategy, in which I placed my camera in a space referred to as ‘twilight’ or ‘threshold zone’ of a cave that receives some daylight, and the ‘dark zone’ that receives none. The resulting, highly contrasting images which are presented as back-lit light-boxes, I hope illustrate my encounter with the sublime’ Jesse Alexander 2013 p 40.

    The sublime radio 4 Podcast In our time

     Exercise 1.6 The contemporary abyss

    Since the very beginning of photography, the city has provided opportunities for the photographer: landscape and other subject matter.

  • Ingrid Pollard

    Website

    Through her practice, Guyanese-born artist Ingrid Pollard addresses her feelings towards the rural countryside as a non-white British subject, articulating her profound sense of being an outsider to these spaces. In some of her projects, Pollard hand tints black-and-white prints. This strategy has a dual purpose: firstly, it is a play on the idea of ‘colour’ in terms of race; and secondly, the use of this antiquated process immediately refers to nostalgic, romanticised ideals of the British landscape.

    In Miss Pollard’s Party (1993), Pollard parodies the tourist postcard, placing her own hand-tinted images on a template depicting ‘Wordsworth Heritage’.

    In Pastoral Interlude (1987) Pollard juxtaposes photographs of figures in the landscape (some of which are herself) with more subversive captions, such as: “It’s as if the Black experience is only lived within an urban environment. I thought I liked the Lake District; where I wandered lonely as a Black face in a sea of white. A visit to the countryside is always accompanied by a feeling of unease; dread.”

    Ingrid Pollard is unusual in that her practice addresses not only her sense of identity as a nonwhite British subject in the UK, but also her experience in relation to the countryside. What Pollard’s work also shows is that the concept of ‘environment’ in relation to the influence of a sense of place transcends geographical concerns alone. Whether a more deep-seated dichotomy exists between the interests of those from or living in the countryside and those in the towns is also a question that extends beyond UK borders.

    Listen to Ingrid Pollard talking about her work and landscape

    Source: Alexander p123

  • Helen Sear

    Creative Wales award.

    Not just the eye. Uses the hand to pain in parts. Sculptural and 3D form. Liberate from computer screen. Different types of paper. Or use CAD.

    Body in the landscape, or landscape in the body

    What does it mean to be both human and animal?

    Wants to concentrate on unremarkable landscape – portrait of a field over a year. Landscape as a living being. And walk to a particular part of forest that changes through being cut down and exposes a particular view suddenly.

    Inside the view

    Beyond the view

    Pond 2011  installation at Crescent Arts Scarborough, UK, March 2011. video of frozen winter pond and trees. Occasional birds. Sheep in silhouette on the horizon.

  • John Pfahl

    Born in New York in 1939, John Pfahl was raised in Wanaque, New Jersey. He received a BFA from Syracuse University’s School of Art and his MA from Syracuse University’s School of Communications. Pfahl is known for his innovative landscape photography such as Altered Landscape, his first major series of un-manipulated color photographs on which he worked from 1974 through 1978. In these pictures Pfahl manipulates the optics of the camera and plays tricks with perspective by using cleverly placed manmade objects in the landscape to mislead the eye of the viewer. For the past thirty years, Pfahl has been creating images of nature that transcribe the forces of nature and how humans affect it. His work has been shown in over hundred group and solo exhibitions and is held in many public and private collections throughout the world. From 1968 to 1983 he taught at the Rochester Institute of Technology, and later at the University of New Mexico, Albuquerque. Pfahl is currently professor of photography at the University at Buffalo, the State University of New York.
    Renske van Leeuwen

    https://www.icp.org/browse/archive/constituents/john-pfahl?all/all/all/all/0

    https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/23/arts/john-pfahl-photographer-who-played-with-landscapes-dies-at-81.html

     

    Power Places

  • The Zone System

    to be further elaborated

    Human vision is far superior to any camera in terms of the range of tones it can encompass within a single field of vision.

    Early photographic emulsions were considerably more sensitive to blue light than to other colours on the spectrum of visible light. This meant that landscape photographs, particularly those made on clear days, had completely blown-out skies as the negatives were much denser in the skies than the foreground, resulting in loss of detail in the (positive) print.

    Edward Muybridge made a library of clouds and skies that would be layered with a negative where the sky detail was absent in order to make photographs that were nearer to human perception.

    The Zone System by Ansel Adams and Fred Archer (1889-1963) is a way to visualise how the tones visible in a scene can most effectively be rendered onto the photographic negative.

    Adams (1981, 60) described the zone scale and its relationship to typical scene elements:

    Zone Description
    0 Pure black
    I Near black, with slight tonality but no texture
    II Textured black; the darkest part of the image in which slight detail is recorded
    III Average dark materials and low values showing adequate texture
    IV Average dark foliage, dark stone, or landscape shadows
    V Middle gray: clear north sky; dark skin, average weathered wood
    VI Average Caucasian skin; light stone; shadows on snow in sunlit landscapes
    VII Very light skin; shadows in snow with acute side lighting
    VIII Lightest tone with texture: textured snow
    IX Slight tone without texture; glaring snow
    X Pure white: light sources and specular reflections

     

    Adams (1981, 52) distinguished among three different exposure scales for the negative:

    • The full range from black to white, represented by Zone 0 through Zone X.
    • The dynamic range comprising Zone I through Zone IX, which Adams considered to represent the darkest and lightest “useful” negative densities.
    • The textural range comprising Zone II through Zone VIII. This range of zones conveys a sense of texture and the recognition of substance.

    Adams and Archer sought to refine and better manage some if the many variables that affected exposure, such as developer formulae and development times, so that the photographer could more strictly control the contrast and range of tones rendered.

    In reality both film and digital sensors can render many more ‘zones’ than just eleven. But reminds us that when you point a light meter at an object it reads it as mid grey (zone 5). Therefore the photographer has to decide where in the scene they wish Zone V to be in order to control exposure properly.

    In colour photography this also needs to be adjusted to allow for the fact that different colours correspond to different tones – yellows are better slightly over-exposed while reds and blues under-exposed.

    Exercise 1.8 The Zone System in Practice

    ——————————————
    TASK Demonstrate your awareness of the principles of the zone system and your ability to take accurate light readings by producing 3 photographs taken in relatively high dynamic range. The exposure should render as much detail as possible in the brightest and darkest areas of the photograph. Collate these and any reflections.

    My reflections on the zone system:

    The system sounds simple but in practice is quite complicated because much depends not only on the extreme white and black points where detail needs to be preserved, but the overall balance of dark and light tones that affect perception of clipping and also the desired key of the image for aesthetic reasons. This means that quite a lot of experimentation is needed to select the metering point that will give the desired result.

    In digital photography, the important point is the preservation of detail in the image that will be available for post-processing rather than any ‘correct exposure’ in the unreliable LCD screen. It is therefore best to have the highlight clipping warning turned on, and also to review the histograms as one works.

    In practice with images of the type of dynamic range I found on the sunniest day in winter, I could adjust both highlights in images exposed for the shadows and shadows in images exposed for the highlights equally easily to regain detail where I wanted them.

    The zone system is certainly a useful guide, but will require a lot of practice to gain real confidence. Alternative methods are auto-bracketing, or using the camera’s matrix metering system together with the highlight clipping warning and exposure compensation where necessary. These two are arguably quicker unless I get really confident.

    The Images

    These images were taken along the river Cam on a sunny day. All the images had both slight black and slight white clipping and were just outside the Dynamic Range of my camera. I used Spot metering and experimented with different metering points to try and reflect the image I had in mind.
    Image 1: Graffiti

    _MG_9576

    In Graffiti my interest was in maintaining detail in the sunlight on the silver graffiti rather than the dark bridge.

    Graffiti 1

    My first attempt took as mid grey the bright grass at the back assuming this was a mid-tone. But this image was much lighter than I wanted with too much clipping on the graffiti and very washed-out. Although the grass was mid-tone for the image as a whole, it was not mid-tone for the image I wanted.

    Graffiti 2My second attempt took the lighter path as the mid-tone. This then pushed all the other tones darker, giving me more detail on the graffiti.

    In post-processing in Lightroom I found though that there was not much difference in what I could do with the image – adjusting the highlights, shadows, exposure and contrast I could achieve pretty much the same effect with either image.

    Image 2: Bridge

    In this image I wanted to highlight the dot of the duck and I was also interested in the white detail and reflections of the V shapes. Again I was not so interested in the shadows except as background contrast.

    Bridge

    This second image was also just outside the dynamic range of my camera with both slight black and white clipping. But because the very white area takes up less of the image, choosing the grass as mid grey worked better because the smaller area of highlight clipping is less noticeable. I took further shots using the water, but that lightened the image too much. Metering from the lighter sky at the back became too dark.

    Image 3: Wier

    In this third image the dynamic range was not as great as it first appeared except for some bright sparkles on the water. The blacks were just within range. The image on the left was spot metered on the water, pushing everything too dark – the spot metre picked up the very tiny bright sparkles rather than the larger grey areas between. The second image I metered on the white water bottom left giving a wider tonal range.

    weit 1 weir 2

  • Landscape and the City

    !!To be developed with documentary

    Since the very beginning of photography, the city has provided opportunities for the photographer: landscape and other subject matter.

    Detachment

    Daguerre’s. ‘View boulevard du temple’. First example of photograph of a person. Only rendered because he must have remained relatively still to have his shoes shined.

    Talbot’s views of Paris.

    “The images of Paris remain passive and mute, and establish not so much the tourist eye-view, hungry for sights to record, as one that was looking for things to record… his London images, for example Nelson’s Column (1843), keep the city at a distance and follow the eye in its way within the urban world.”
    (Clarke, 1997, p.77)

    Eugene Atget

    Social documentary

    John Thomson Street Life in London

    Jacob Riis How the other half lives.

    Brassai

    Cities within cities

    A recurring line of investigation is that of the city, not just as one complete interconnecting  unit, but layers of different cities within cities. Sometimes these elements are briefly exposed to one another, but often they are designed to restrain their inhabitants from uncomfortable contact with each other. Eg film In Time.

    Paul Seawright.    Invisible Cities.

     

    1.9: Visual research and analysis – social contrasts

  • Eugene Atget

    The French photographer Eugène Atget (1857–1927) produced documentary photography that
    was far removed from the frontier of photojournalism. During a working life that lasted from
    1890 to 1927, Atget produced 10,000 images of Paris, working with a large format 24x18cm
    wooden camera and making and coating his own large glass plate negatives. Atget cared deeply
    about the small traders, street musicians, actors, artists, ribbon sellers, etc., who were being
    squeezed out of their livings by modernisation. He also cared for the architecture of the republic,
    much of which was crumbling and in a state of squalor, just waiting to be demolished. Atget
    was motivated more by the need to re-create, preserve and document the old city’s existence
    than by a desire to create imagery for sale.
    It’s not difficult to imagine these
    works as paintings. (Compare Atget’s
    Bitumiers with Gustave Caillebotte’s The
    Floor Scrapers, for example.) You’ll find
    more Atget images in the Bridgeman
    Art Library. Follow the link on the OCA
    student website. Some of Atget’s work
    showed surrealist elements. Look at his
    famous ‘corset shop’ photograph, for
    example.
    Project Photography as art
    Water Lilies Eugène Atget. Not Paris this time, but recognisably
    in a fine art tradition i.e. Monet.
    Bitumiers

  • Andreas Gursky

    Andreas Gursky (born January 15, 1955) is a German photographer and Professor at the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf, Germany. Gursky shares a studio with Laurenz Berges, Thomas Ruff and Axel Hutte on the Hansaallee, in Düsseldorf. The building, a former electricity station, was transformed into an artists studio and living quarters, in 2001, by architects Herzog & de Meuron, of Tate Modern fame. In 2010-11, the architects worked again on the building, designing a gallery in the basement.

    He is known for his large format architecture and landscape colour photographs, often employing a high point of view. Before the 1990s, Gursky did not digitally manipulate his images. In the years since, Gursky has been frank about his reliance on computers to edit and enhance his pictures, creating an art of spaces larger than the subjects photographed.

    The perspective in many of Gursky’s photographs is drawn from an elevated vantage point. This position enables the viewer to encounter scenes, encompassing both centre and periphery, which are ordinarily beyond reach. Visually, Gursky is drawn to large, anonymous, man-made spaces—high-rise facades at night, office lobbies, stock exchanges, the interiors of big box retailers (See his print 99 Cent II Diptychon).

    Gursky’s style is enigmatic and deadpan. There is little to no explanation or manipulation on the works. His photography is straightforward.

    Gursky’s Dance Valley festival photograph, taken near Amsterdam in 1995, depicts attendees facing a DJ stand in a large arena, beneath strobe lighting effects. The pouring smoke resembles a human hand, holding the crowd in stasis. After completing the print, Gursky explained the only music he now listens to is the anonymous, beat-heavy style known as Trance, as its symmetry and simplicity echoes his own work—while playing towards a deeper, more visceral emotion.

    The photograph 99 Cent (1999) was taken at a 99 Cents Only store on Sunset Boulevard in Los Angeles, and depicts its interior as a stretched horizontal composition of parallel shelves, intersected by vertical white columns, in which the abundance of “neatly labeled packets are transformed into fields of colour, generated by endless arrays of identical products, reflecting off the shiny ceiling” (Wyatt Mason).

    The Rhine II (1999), depicts a stretch of the river Rhine outside Düsseldorf, immediately legible as a view of a straight stretch of water, but also as an abstract configuration of horizontal bands of colour of varying widths.]

    In his six-part series Ocean I-VI (2009-2010), Gursky used high-definition satellite photographs which he augmented from various picture sources on the Internet.