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I’m called a landscape photographer, but when I give presentations to photo clubs I begin by stating that I’m not a photographer, I’m an artist who uses a camera. But even that’s not true. Once I was in my booth at an art show and someone asked if I was the artist. I answered “no, I’m just the photographer,” thinking that nature is the artist.
We don’t have a word for what I do. My art is to position myself in the right place and be there at the right time to see something in nature with a certain kind of beauty that is dramatically powerful. Timing is important. The Greeks had a word for beautiful, that came from their word for “hour”, indicating that beauty happens at a certain time. I agree.
My goal has been to produce photographs of nature that I’d want to hang on my wall and look at every day, but it’s taken a few years to understand what I’m really doing and why.
My quest for an understanding of beauty led me to study with a master of Japanese aesthetics, Shozo Sato. He taught me tea ceremony, flower arranging, and calligraphy, and helped me understand composition on a deep level. But I had a more fundamental question: what is beauty?
Eventually I realized that beauty doesn’t exist. It’s a noun we use to label anything that causes certain emotions in us; therefore beauty IS in the eye of the beholder. Because we are all unique personalities with complex psychologies, and all at different stages of our spiritual evolution, different stimuli will evoke those emotions in different people.
What emotions? We don’t have a word for our emotional response to beauty. We can be pleased, satisfied, satiated, calmed, soothed, relaxed, fulfilled, or, we can be captivated, astounded overwhelmed, awed, enraptured, become ecstatic, or feel harmonious or at one with nature.
I think there are two basic emotional responses to natural beauty–comfort and shock. The shock is what interests me.
Denis Dutton, an art philosopher who has given a TED presentation, confirmed my suspicions that humans seem to have inherited an aesthetic sense that causes us to appreciate hospitable scenes with livestock and water and shelter–what I’d call a pastoral scene. This is the type of beauty that evokes comfort. I appreciate this kind of beauty–this is my cabin here in Alaska–but I don’t photograph pastoral scenes.
Dutton says that “in general, people everywhere who have been subject to the will of nature are less inclined to be charmed by its beauties.” But I think he’s leaving out the concept of choice. When people of undeveloped areas have no choice but to live subject to the will of nature, then they would love to dominate it, and the beauty of a landscape is of little concern. But here in the developed world where we have a greater ability to insulate ourselves from nature’s will, we can choose to go into nature, be subject to its will, and still be emotionally moved by its beauty. Many will even intentionally endure discomfort in order to find inspiration from wilderness.
Inspiration, breathing in, GASP, is our response to shocking beauty. Exhalation, breathing out, SIGH, is our response to comfortable beauty. The in-breath is the renewal and the out-breath is the expiration, the release, the end. When we are stunned by the perception of what is, for us, profoundly beautiful, we first breathe in, and are filled with what might be considered divine. Then the mental construct of self can expire.
In his book, “Mountains of the Mind,” Robert McFarland claims that it’s only in recent times that humans have begun to appreciate the extremes of nature, which have been so inhospitable for all of history. He says that the meaning of awe has also changed. The original meaning had more to do with fear. It comes from an old English word meaning terror and dread. Todays definition, “a feeling of reverential respect mixed with fear or wonder,” still includes that element, but as you know, in recent decades the word “awesome” has lost it’s potency, the meaning has changed, and so we have lost a means of communicating an emotion that is at the heart of my inquiry –that is, why the inhospitable is profoundly beautiful to some people. This was the basic question of my book, The Granite Avatars of Patagonia. Why is it that a big rock can shock a human into a profound state of consciousness?
A few decades ago Joseph Campbell said, “The aesthetic experience is a simple beholding of the object….you experience a radiance. You are held in aesthetic arrest.” “Aesthetic arrest” is what I‘m interested in. Campbell borrowed the phrase from James Joyce who wrote that in the presence of great beauty “The mind is arrested and raised above desire and loathing.” In my words, the egoic mind is stopped and we are left face to face with the true nature of reality: one immense, infinitely complicated, interconnected miracle that our consciousness is part of, yet can be enraptured by.
While researching the true nature of reality, I came across another Campbell–Thomas Campbell, a physicist who has been exploring in other dimensions for over 30 years. This Campbell has written what he calls his big TOE in which he says that all of existence is evolving away from entropy, that is, away from chaos and towards organization, harmony, and ultimately towards Pure Love. This made perfect sense to me. It confirmed my suspicions about human evolution. But I was confused by the fact that many of my most dramatic landscapes were photographs of the results of erosion, which is an entropic process. Why is entropy responsible for revealing divine sculptures of rock that are shockingly beautiful? I was stuck on that one, so I asked Mr Campbell, who pointed to the obvious, that the granite spires and canyon walls that I photograph are what resists entropy. They are what is still standing after millions of years of being attacked by the brutal and relentless forces of erosion. He said they convey a sense of awesome, invincible power, and that in viewing them we can be reminded that we are an integral part of the source of that power. He said that can have a healing effect.
A majestic peak seems to say, “The world around me may be falling apart, but I stand strong, with dignity and integrity, pointing the way past the ego, to love.”
We don’t have a word for this spiritual healing by natural beauty. The Spanish word “alucinante” led me to create a word: “elucinate,” which means “to reveal the truth (or enlighten) by blowing one’s mind.” Please use it if you like it.
My suspicion is that while we humans are evolving towards love, we are all at different stages. I suspect that fear is associated with entropy, and that fear is what prevents us from experiencing aesthetic arrest when observing nature’s most inhospitable and awesome scenery. When we are fearful we do experience the terror of such powerful landscapes, if we allow ourselves to really look, and we will keep our distance. But as we evolve past fear, we can actually be healed by that same landscape, especially if we enter it.
The word “heal” comes from the same root as “whole.” Just as two sides of a wound come back together, we can heal the rift between our individuated selves and the omnipotent forces that rule over all.
This is why people can have life-changing experiences in dramatic wild landscapes, and why I find compositions in such places, record them with a camera, and show them to others.
