Of Old Time and Of New Eternity

Our passage through time and space and the flux created by this confluence, and what this might say about the human experience, has been one of the great preoccupations of artists since even before the days of Einstein. Running counterpoint to this, another perspective has seen our relationship to these concepts as being more static. Proust suggested that in theory we are aware of the turning of the Earth, but as the ground seems not to move in practice we do not perceive it, and so it is with the passage of time in our lives and our reception of it.

It is such a stillness that looms over and seeps through these distant landscapes. This is not the stillness innate to the photographic image, the inertia created by the capture of the singular event of a unique position at a unique time. Instead we perceive a pre-existing, elemental stillness that is inherent in the relationship between subject and author. It is as if the camera has not stopped time but been stopped by it, and has not limited space but is made to stand as a witness to its own limitations.

More conventional imaginings of the sublime are established upon the notion that the frenzy of nature at war shows us its power, its energy, its immensity. However perhaps in this immediacy nature loses that element of the eternal that is paramount to its being, that concept of vastness in both space and time.

An austere portrait of the world at repose can thus reveal this immeasurable essence. Nature is reduced to the simplest of lines and forms, and yet the most fundamental. Our gaze, unimpaired by redundant detail, alights upon only that which is important, the transparent, immovable facts.

On the shores of Walden Pond Henry David Thoreau wrote how he desired “to live so sturdily and Spartan-like as to put to rout all that was not life, to cut a broad swath and shave close, to drive life into a corner and reduce it to its lowest terms.” Such a philosophy could also inform a method of formal inspection. Here the camera is wielded in an ascetic fashion, seeking out the stillness and silence, the simplicity and the serenity of the world so that we might discover, examine and learn from those precious particles that contain and construct existence. This is matter that can only be found through prolonged examination, and its discovery produces something akin to a pure visualisation of the sublime.

However the diminution of nature in visual terms carries with it the suggestion of actual physical destruction. Furthermore the experience of rare moments of connection with the planet sadly demonstrates the existence of the mighty gulf between humanity and the environment that we continue to decimate. Yet we forget that Nature is not wholly passive. In all its functions, but most evidently in the snowfall, Nature carries the capability of self-renewal, for at its most benign it can blot out the traces of man, and at its other extreme it holds the power to destroy man in bodily actuality. For these are images that not only speak of the infinite character of the natural world but of the finite character of the world created by human nature.

By David low
(as published in Next Level June 2006)