256
autobiographical.” As the tuberculosis overwhelmed the 36-year-old genius, his
song declared, “…‘tis all in vain. Death and despair must end the fatal pain.’”
8
Like a song, a photograph gives us the ephemeral yet lasting impact of an image
in our minds. Photographer August Sander (1876–1964) acknowledged that
“humans often change the results of biological process” and partly attributed the
power of landscape photography to the recognition of the “human spirit of a time…
captured with the help of the camera.”
9
Few photographs are as given to the comprehensive dislocation of aesthetic vulnerability to the rude, glib, metallic mechanics than that which we would, absent a
camera in our hands, hail as sublime. This was the dislocation through technology
that John Ruskin found so distasteful, as described in his writings, particularly in
The Elements of Drawing & the Elements of Perspective.
10
Ruskin (1819–1900)
knew well the incremental problems. He was not just the social critic and art historian, but a painter and amateur photographer, greatly conflicted by the irrepressible
contagion of beauty in landscapes. In time he grew concerned that the tremendous
verisimilitude of an Albert Bierstadt or Frederic Church landscape might be eclipsed
by the mirror-imagery of photography, and contested the photographic soul. It could
not replace the emotions of a great painter’s patient interactions with a glacier or a
tree. And this was abundantly evident in the Yosemite Valley and at Niagara Falls.
These two matrices of gravity have been viewed, and swarmed, of course, by
hundreds of millions of enthusiasts during the past centuries, economic rationale,
goes one lumbering argument, for their very protection. The tragedy of that theory
of democratization for the people was the exile and assimilation of the people, the
Miwok themselves.
11
Their culture’s virtual extirpation from Yosemite’s valley floor
in 1923, as the first automobiles poured into the park, was memorialized by the
height of government arrogance in the form of the Chandelier Tree “Drive-Thru”.
This was a 276-foot-tall Sequoia sempervirens at Leggett, California, with a hole
carved out at the base, 6 ft by 6.9 ft. A savage puncture large enough for one of the
park superintendent’s ludicrously lauded automobiles to pass through. The overall
crisis accompanying such desecration accompanies Columbus’ deep-seated legacy,
pitting the personable and private against the mob; aesthetic genocide, one after the
other across the map of North America, and—at the species level—the entire planet.
8 Henry Purcell, by Robert King, Thames And Hudson, 1994, p. 226.
9 “Photography as a Universal Language,” Lecture 5, April 12, 1931, Accompanying #14, “The
Siebengebirge seen from the Westerwald, 1930s,” August Sander – Seeing, Observing and
Thinking -Photographs, with text by August Sander and Gabriele Conrath-Scholl, Die
Photographische Sammlung/SK Stiftung Kultur, Foundation Henri Cartier-Bresson, Schirmer/
Mosel, Paris 2009.
10 In The Ethics of the Dust, Fiction fair and foul, The Elements of Drawing, by John Ruskin,
Illustrated Cabinet Edition, Merrill and Baker, New York, 1877.
11 Legends of the Yosemite Miwok, compiled by Frank LaPena and Craig D. Bates, illustrated by
Harry Fonseca, published by the Yosemite Natural History Association, Yosemite National Park,
California 1981.
27 The Metaphysics of Photography
autobiographical.” As the tuberculosis overwhelmed the 36-year-old genius, his
song declared, “…‘tis all in vain. Death and despair must end the fatal pain.’”
8
Like a song, a photograph gives us the ephemeral yet lasting impact of an image
in our minds. Photographer August Sander (1876–1964) acknowledged that
“humans often change the results of biological process” and partly attributed the
power of landscape photography to the recognition of the “human spirit of a time…
captured with the help of the camera.”
9
Few photographs are as given to the comprehensive dislocation of aesthetic vulnerability to the rude, glib, metallic mechanics than that which we would, absent a
camera in our hands, hail as sublime. This was the dislocation through technology
that John Ruskin found so distasteful, as described in his writings, particularly in
The Elements of Drawing & the Elements of Perspective.
10
Ruskin (1819–1900)
knew well the incremental problems. He was not just the social critic and art historian, but a painter and amateur photographer, greatly conflicted by the irrepressible
contagion of beauty in landscapes. In time he grew concerned that the tremendous
verisimilitude of an Albert Bierstadt or Frederic Church landscape might be eclipsed
by the mirror-imagery of photography, and contested the photographic soul. It could
not replace the emotions of a great painter’s patient interactions with a glacier or a
tree. And this was abundantly evident in the Yosemite Valley and at Niagara Falls.
These two matrices of gravity have been viewed, and swarmed, of course, by
hundreds of millions of enthusiasts during the past centuries, economic rationale,
goes one lumbering argument, for their very protection. The tragedy of that theory
of democratization for the people was the exile and assimilation of the people, the
Miwok themselves.
11
Their culture’s virtual extirpation from Yosemite’s valley floor
in 1923, as the first automobiles poured into the park, was memorialized by the
height of government arrogance in the form of the Chandelier Tree “Drive-Thru”.
This was a 276-foot-tall Sequoia sempervirens at Leggett, California, with a hole
carved out at the base, 6 ft by 6.9 ft. A savage puncture large enough for one of the
park superintendent’s ludicrously lauded automobiles to pass through. The overall
crisis accompanying such desecration accompanies Columbus’ deep-seated legacy,
pitting the personable and private against the mob; aesthetic genocide, one after the
other across the map of North America, and—at the species level—the entire planet.
8 Henry Purcell, by Robert King, Thames And Hudson, 1994, p. 226.
9 “Photography as a Universal Language,” Lecture 5, April 12, 1931, Accompanying #14, “The
Siebengebirge seen from the Westerwald, 1930s,” August Sander – Seeing, Observing and
Thinking -Photographs, with text by August Sander and Gabriele Conrath-Scholl, Die
Photographische Sammlung/SK Stiftung Kultur, Foundation Henri Cartier-Bresson, Schirmer/
Mosel, Paris 2009.
10 In The Ethics of the Dust, Fiction fair and foul, The Elements of Drawing, by John Ruskin,
Illustrated Cabinet Edition, Merrill and Baker, New York, 1877.
11 Legends of the Yosemite Miwok, compiled by Frank LaPena and Craig D. Bates, illustrated by
Harry Fonseca, published by the Yosemite Natural History Association, Yosemite National Park,
California 1981.
27 The Metaphysics of Photography