255
projecting all those changes by which “nature begins” and with which human consciousness struggles to articulate itself.
3
The photograph hastens our love affairs with philosophical fiction, the Self as
participant in something greater than the Self—an ecosystem, of sorts. Yet, every
produced image brings us closer to an oblivion of the unproduced, the inchoate,
filled with lingering doubts, or withheld sensations doubting its scientific verity.
This question of ecological certainty, patriotism, or the egotistical aggrandizement
connoted by the manufacture of images involves conundrums of psychology, of
speculative realism, panoramic endemism, picturesque escapism, those postcards
and billboards, the rational and irrational, potential and actual, underlying principles of identity, integrity, and place. Ultimately, the landscapes of mind, those myriad, wistful losses of physical identity into the greater miasma of an aesthetic swamp
that is the photograph, leave us ecologically stymied. There could be no stranger
paradox than that of a landscape photograph. Taking into account the optical technology, what is it, really?
27.2 Picturesque Prolegomenae
All of these changing artistic and objective tides are, to quote Kant’s definitive
Prolegomena To Any Future Metaphysic (1783), a gratifying antithesis of the critique of reality we would personally prefer to reject: “Thus the order and regularity
in phenomena, which we call nature, we ourselves introduce, and should never find
it there, if we, or the nature of our mind, had not originally placed it there.”
4
Just
think about Eugène Atget’s spectacular subtlety in his photograph of “La Marne à
la Varenne,” (1925–1927, Museum of Modern Art, New York).
5
This gold-toned
print on paper, of the Abbott-Levy Collection, resounds with the black and white
paradise of a few slack canoes. The draping trees, the commune in the Maine-etLoire department, with its 100 bird and 17 dragonfly species, ring-necked snakes,
and 370 plants species.
6
All converge in the imagination of that estimated 100
meters of reflective waterway—a rarified scintilla of aqueous contemplation out of
514 kilometers of this eastern tributary of the Seine southeast of Paris—witnessed
upon no particular day or hour by a photographer about whom “few facts are
known.”
7
Just before the astonishing English composer Henry Purcell died in 1695 he
wrote a song, “From rosy bowers” that has been described as “horrifically
3 See Aristotle’s Metaphysics, translated with Commentaries and Glossary by Hippocrates
G. Apostle, The Peripatetic Press, Grinnell, Iowa, 1979, p. 73.
4 Kant’s Critical Philosophy, by John P. Mahaffy and John H. Bernard, Macmillan And Co.,
London, 1889, p.177.
5 See A World History Of Photography, by Naomi Rosenblum, Abbeville Press, New York, p.278.
6 See “Fauna and Flora in Meaux,” https://www.boating-paris-marindeaudouce.com/fauna-florameaux/, Accessed March 12, 2020.
7 op. cit., Rosenblum, p. 278.
27.2 Picturesque Prolegomenae
projecting all those changes by which “nature begins” and with which human consciousness struggles to articulate itself.
3
The photograph hastens our love affairs with philosophical fiction, the Self as
participant in something greater than the Self—an ecosystem, of sorts. Yet, every
produced image brings us closer to an oblivion of the unproduced, the inchoate,
filled with lingering doubts, or withheld sensations doubting its scientific verity.
This question of ecological certainty, patriotism, or the egotistical aggrandizement
connoted by the manufacture of images involves conundrums of psychology, of
speculative realism, panoramic endemism, picturesque escapism, those postcards
and billboards, the rational and irrational, potential and actual, underlying principles of identity, integrity, and place. Ultimately, the landscapes of mind, those myriad, wistful losses of physical identity into the greater miasma of an aesthetic swamp
that is the photograph, leave us ecologically stymied. There could be no stranger
paradox than that of a landscape photograph. Taking into account the optical technology, what is it, really?
27.2 Picturesque Prolegomenae
All of these changing artistic and objective tides are, to quote Kant’s definitive
Prolegomena To Any Future Metaphysic (1783), a gratifying antithesis of the critique of reality we would personally prefer to reject: “Thus the order and regularity
in phenomena, which we call nature, we ourselves introduce, and should never find
it there, if we, or the nature of our mind, had not originally placed it there.”
4
Just
think about Eugène Atget’s spectacular subtlety in his photograph of “La Marne à
la Varenne,” (1925–1927, Museum of Modern Art, New York).
5
This gold-toned
print on paper, of the Abbott-Levy Collection, resounds with the black and white
paradise of a few slack canoes. The draping trees, the commune in the Maine-etLoire department, with its 100 bird and 17 dragonfly species, ring-necked snakes,
and 370 plants species.
6
All converge in the imagination of that estimated 100
meters of reflective waterway—a rarified scintilla of aqueous contemplation out of
514 kilometers of this eastern tributary of the Seine southeast of Paris—witnessed
upon no particular day or hour by a photographer about whom “few facts are
known.”
7
Just before the astonishing English composer Henry Purcell died in 1695 he
wrote a song, “From rosy bowers” that has been described as “horrifically
3 See Aristotle’s Metaphysics, translated with Commentaries and Glossary by Hippocrates
G. Apostle, The Peripatetic Press, Grinnell, Iowa, 1979, p. 73.
4 Kant’s Critical Philosophy, by John P. Mahaffy and John H. Bernard, Macmillan And Co.,
London, 1889, p.177.
5 See A World History Of Photography, by Naomi Rosenblum, Abbeville Press, New York, p.278.
6 See “Fauna and Flora in Meaux,” https://www.boating-paris-marindeaudouce.com/fauna-florameaux/, Accessed March 12, 2020.
7 op. cit., Rosenblum, p. 278.
27.2 Picturesque Prolegomenae