Beauty in Photography (6) - The Sublime

Unmoored by beauty, carried to the sublime, we find ourselves in a life-stopping place. It's not a  place outside ourselves. We never stay transfixed there more than a moment. The sublime is an ultimate end, a rapture. We have to move on or expire.

In sublimation a solid substance transmutes directly into vapor without melting. As in frost crystals on a cold day returning to the atmosphere with no intermediary droplets or puddles, dematerializing to the ether.

Mystics, mothers, and soldiers take sublime risks to engender life. Techniques of breath sustain their achievements. Beauty unites both creation and sacrifice.

The Beauty that concerns me is that of Form. Beauty is, in my view, a synonym for the coherence and structure underlying life.

Robert Adams, Beauty in Photography

[It] can only be found within a framework that is larger than we are, an encompassing totality invulnerable to our worst behavior and most corrosive anxieties.

How is it that the subjects of these pictures, absorbed in ordinary life moments, can represent grand experiences when captured just so in a photograph?

Exterior images lead the photographer to memories, revelations, hopes and dreams.

Art simplifies. It is never exactly equal to life. In the visual arts, this careful sorting out in favor of order is called composition.

Innocence and gravity reveal the beauty of the uncontrived.

William Carlos Williams said that poets write for a single reason‒to give witness to splendor. It is a useful word, especially for photographers.

Beauty depends on discovery. It's just a feeling about what is‒what already is, all by itself.

The looking and the feeling call for response. The photographer finds ways to make it his own.

I have...learned, however, that the word beauty is in practice unavoidable. Its very centrality accounts, in fact, for my decision to photograph.

There appeared a quality‒Beauty seemed the only appropriate word for it‒in certain photographs and paintings that opened my eyes, and I was compelled to learn to live with the vocabulary of this new sight, though for many years I still found it embarrassing to use the word Beauty, even while believing in it.

The sublime stops us in our tracks. It takes our breath away, pulls us to unity with beauty. But we have to be ourselves. We have to keep breathing and moving, or become ethereal.

Time is movement toward the sublime.