bdec
Spiral
In his Meditations (xi.10), Marcus Aurelius said “No form of Nature is inferior to Art; for the arts merely imitate natural forms.” Whilst the veracity of this seems obvious, along the lines of the Ecclesiastical notion of “nothing new under the sun”, the photographer’s art is not imitative at all. It is, in fact, genuine in a way no other art can be . He does not brush paint to canvas, chip away with a chisel, make lines with a piece of chalk or put words together on paper. He is not deciding upon the accurate dimensions or calculating the mix of colors or letters. His art is in the manner in which his eyes see what is already there.
Deeply recessed between the obvious and the imagined, the photograph does not imitate nature – it reveals nature. Though we may point the camera this way or that, choose a high or a low angle, adjust lighting or even create an optical cradle with depth of field, we cannot fundamentally alter the nature of the subject. It is what it is and the camera is a recording device, it can only record what it sees and it can only see what the photographer tells it to see. Aurelius could not have foreseen the invention of such a device but one wonders what he would have written had he encountered this photograph – clearly not an imitation and clearly a work of art.
Blog photograph copyrighted to the photographer and used with permission by utata.org. All photographs used on utata.org are stored on flickr.com and are obtained via the flickr API. Text is copyrighted to the author, catherinejamieson and is used with permission by utata.org. Please see Show and Share Your Work
