Movement Studies Number 56, 1949
the Sublime
31v26
Last night we had a first meeting of 4-way Octogenarian Dining, in which there was much discussion of photography as avocation. At one point I referred to a Minor White image as 'sublime':
and Wende (who knew Minor White back in the day) asked what it was that I saw in/drew from that particular photograph... and I said that I'd have to consider my response, because it's complex —meaning both the notion of sublime and my application of that characterization to the image.
Part of the Story has to do with the word sublime
Wikipedia is quite helpful: Sublime (philosophy), which offers several 'See also' links that are tempting rabbit holes:Digital sublime
Numinous
Overview effect
Sense of wonder
Sublime (literary)If I ask myself how sublime fits with MY Keywords, here's the subset that seem especially relevant:
*apotheosis(unpacking that relevance is a whole other adventure)
*creativity
*emergence
*Imagination
*ineffable
*Mind
*paradigm
*signification
*surreal
*verisimilitude
1vi26
The morning brought The poetic ontology of the photographic image Jorge López-Canales (pdf)
...Niépce's hazy images of Paris rooftops (Fig. 2.4) postulated a radically changed way of understanding visual representation. Sharpness and precision, the marks of the focused mode of attention that produced the modern still life, were no longer a necessary precondition for truthfulness. This time it was light itself, through the photographic process, that dictated the conditions for visual engagement.
[the image is from Saint-Loup-de-Varennes, not Paris]'Poetic ontology' got me thinking about other images in my catalog of the remembered that I would group with Minor White's Movement #56, and I thought of Marcel Duchamp's 'Nude Descending a Staircase' (1912)
Both images skewer Time.
That thought prompted construction of a gallery of photographs that deal with Time, beginning with Nicéphor Niépce's 1827 image:
View from the Window at Le Gras
(as enhanced by Helmut Gernsheim❧ ❧ ❧ ...and proceed to Louis Daguerre's Boulevard du Temple (1837-38), "widely considered to be the first photograph to include an image of a human":
❧ ❧ ❧ and on to the work of Eadweard Muybridge, (and see Rebecca Solnit River of Shadows: Eadweard Muybridge and the Technological Wild West) (2004)
❧ ❧ ❧ Jacques-Henri Lartigue
❧ ❧ ❧ Henri Cartier-Bresson (1932)
❧ ❧ ❧ Harold Edgerton
❧ ❧ ❧ Minor White (1948=9)
❧ ❧ ❧ Elizabeth Root (1963)
❧ ❧ ❧
Nicholas Nixon: The Brown Sisters
photographed every year for 40 years❧ ❧ ❧
The Seventh Day
(pinhole camera project)❧ ❧ ❧
The images above speak to the polysemy of Time, the shades of meaning (the Semantics) that orbit the word's/concept's Meaning. What a glorious medium is the Photograph, having the power of the medium to capture the fleeting essence of Time, and preserve it for our study. Sublimity is earned...
Later I got to wondering about relations among and between *sublime, *subliminal, and *surreal... (another project awaits)
2vi26
Ontology appeared again, via Everyone Has an Ontology Now. Almost Nobody Has an Ontology: Extended Analysis Dr Nicolas Figay at Medium
...computable representations of knowledge...metaphysical engineering
...Arthur Koestler's concept of the holon — something that is simultaneously a whole and a part — exposes these limitations with particular clarity. Classical decomposition logic assumes stable containment, transitive hierarchy, clean boundaries, and unambiguous levels. Holonic systems exhibit recursive embedding, contextual identity, multi-perspectival existence, dynamic scale dependence, partially autonomous subsystems, and overlapping organizational structures. This is extremely difficult to express cleanly in flat graphs, strict trees, classical object hierarchies, or DL-constrained ontologies.
In February I gathered material on 'ontology' and today I wondered about the ways in which MY Keywords can be considered as ontology...
=====
Links that need connectingSubliminal stimuli WikipediaSubliminal Wiktionary
