Guest Writer: Shooting the Sublime

This year, the Whole Earth Care Blog will focus on paying attention to the gifts that are offered to us from Earth and our Earth Family.

When we take the time to really see, we become entranced, we fall in love. We wish to become involved, to support and lend a hand. We begin to see that we are a community, a family.


This week, Tom offers us a delightfully witty and insightful article on the digital camera and the true Art of Seeing. Take a bit of time for yourselves, sit back and enjoy.

Give him alms, woman
For there is nothing in this life
Like the sorrow of being
Blind in Granada.
Francisco de Icaza

SHOOTING THE SUBLIME

"Although all the senses participate in the discovering and experiencing the beauty-full, the tourist’s primary job is to see. Unlike joining the Army, tourism remains a relatively low-risk way to see the world. Thus, the most recent icon of world tourism, the digital camera, would seem a welcome complement to the tourist knap-sack. Thanks to this amazing piece of digital wizardry, recording visual experience has become an almost innate skill, rendering obsolete, with a mere push of the button, the fuss and muss of the picture post card with the intriguing foreign stamp, handwriting and the haiku greeting. No more fragile film, light meters, free-hand sketches, travel diaries, nor just plain old remembering; the camera’s the thing wherein one captures the soul of the sublime.

As the sword once empowered the conquistador and the cross the missionary, this sleek, hand-held, magic picture box has become the technological extension of homo viatorius in his role as ‘see-er.’ Since technological progress is neither positive, negative, nor neutral, there are, of course, consequences.

Due to the massive propagation of the digital camera, the tourist is no longer mere solitary adventurer, exploring marvels, great and small, uncovered leisurely on his journey of discovery. In addition to his traditional role as ‘sight-seer,’ the complete tourist must now also assume the role of ‘sight-recorder,’ a seemingly complementary role, but one which imposes a new duty—the bringing back alive of sights seen. The tourist’s unique face-to-face with the sublime then becomes a reproducible commodity, and his new task a social obligation, that is, the duty to reproduce digitally, for self and others, the visual experience.

Assuming this new role as visual trophy collector, however, creates a significant shift in tourist objectives, and it is not merely a shift in emphasis. This new technological icon, not unlike the sword and the cross, empowers the tourist to access a country’s natural and artistic wonders, while avoiding communion with the natives and participation in the cultural routine, thus surreptitiously tipping the delicate balance between the seer and the seen. This imbalance repeats the history of Europe’s colonizing of the New World and the African continent, wherein both the colonized and the colonizer ended up mutually diminished. A camera-safari remains a safari, with all its colonial reverberations; only the porters and the beaters are confused by the invisible kill.

As the desirability, simplicity, and economic availability of the digital camera has anointed it as touristically essential as sun screen and bottled water, the rituals of digital picture-taking have grown exponentially; taking not just a few, but a plethora of photos, has flourished into a primary tourist pastime, equally, if not more importantly, than ‘getting there’ and ‘being there.’ There are currently a number of tour packages which promise participants just enough time ‘in situ’ to take pictures, before swiftly whisking them off to the next photogenic destination. As they say in the trade, 'What you take in, you take out—and fast.'

Because the quantity of shots snapped is limited only by tour-time and battery longevity, myriad photos now record minutely every step of the earnest tourist’s trek both to and from the coveted sight-to-be-seen. And, once face-to-face with the culmination of tourist desire, it is not unusual to witness gangs of fast shooting camera slingers, caught in the cross-fire of an orgiastic digital shoot-out, in which photo gatherers and other strangers are trapped involuntarily in random view-finders, hindering mutually each other’s unbridled quest for the perfect shot, be it of the enchanting verandas of the Alhambra, the mystic light of Sainte Chapelle, the thunderous regard of Michelangelo’s Moses, the moody mists of Iguazu; each individual, intent only on his capture of an ineffable visual trophy, aligns eye and arm and view-finder in his attempt to freeze digitally an elusive epiphany of that infinite fecundity we label ‘Life.’


The digital capturing of the individual’s face-to-face with the sublime, however, often substitutes for the actual experience of beholding the wonder of nature, art or architecture. It is not unusual to see tourists spending precious ‘on-sight` time verifying or admiring the success of their snaps, rather than actually contemplating - with the naked eye - the primary object of their attention. Many seem to prefer the digital intermediary for filtering the experience of the glorious sight before them, as if confident that whatever is not noticed now will be there later--back in the hotel room… or on Facebook.

The act of seeing, however, is not for the double-parked before the rush-hour brothel of the tourist industry, notwithstanding Henry David Thoreau, who, according to a wag of his era, got more out of 15 minutes with a chipmunk than most couples get out of an hour in the sack. I suspect that neither Thoreau nor the chipmunk would approve such a comparison. They would, I believe, support that of Georgia O’Keefe, that painterly voyeur of the sensual flower: 'Still—in a way—nobody sees a flower—really—it is so small—we haven’t time—and to see takes time, like to have a friend takes time.'

And seeing remains the activity which most distinguishes the human from other animals. Though itself a simple act, seeing, like loving, is not the easiest; seeing requires silencing the clamouring of all our interior selves, being there – wholly - in the reality of now, active loving attention to the object, passive openness to the reality of the sublime. It is somewhat complicated today to see Niagara Falls.

Though we may not even know the name of what is seen nor its history, it is to be welcomed as honoured guest in the caverns of our beings and in the chimneys of our hearts. That it is visible, of this earth, and before us suffices. The encounter may trigger - metaphorically, of course - something akin to the English translation of Chief Joseph’s wonder-full Indian name: ‘Thunder Travelling Across the Lake…and Fading on the Mountainside.’


Not unlike the mystic’s face-to-face with the ineffable, the seer approaches the object-to-be-seen with respect and humility and receptivity to the presence of the real. There is an interior movement, the seer is sensibly enriched, brimful and flowing over; but it is impossible to describe what is received; there is no rational cause-effect, no object of computability. There is just communion with the grandeur of now, a humble being, there, within the eternity of the instant, something like the swan-dive of the spirit…

And, yes, Virginia, seeing happens… even to us ordinary mortals, not through any calculated effort of our own, but only because this is, always was, and always will be, the way of beauty with mankind.

Unfortunately, the faculty of wonder tires easily. Life would seem a great deal fuller than it does if it were not for the fact that the human being is, by nature, a creature to whom ‘O Glory!’ is less spontaneous than ‘Ho-hum.’ Today, however, thanks to digital gadgetry, it seems no longer necessary to commune with the wonders of our world. The grandeur of paintings, sculpture, mediaeval cathedrals, mosques, bridges, boats, and the manifestations of nature may easily be condensed to the square foot of the computer screen, in effect, replacing the contemplative moment and those very human activities which are potentially a part of that o-so-rare seeing event: e.g., a sense of fullness (everything is there; nothing is missing…), communion, awe, gratitude for being, the stopping of time (eternity in the instant of the now), the silencing of the rational, tears (Why not? There is so much…).

Like the ‘video-sizing’ of the Hollywood blockbuster and the consequent downsizing of the movie theatre and the giant screen, the digital camera is merely another evolutionary step in the technological miniaturization of the awesome. In this reductive process, something essentially human is being radically altered: the sublime, reduced to size of a credit card; the concomitant miniaturization of the architecture of the soul. Air travel may have shrunk the world and world tourism may be the express elevator to the department of the marvellous, but, like the lady said, 'The screens just keep getting smaller.' And, unfortunately, we with them.

The history of photography is laced with anecdotes about strangely recalcitrant men and women, refusing to be photographed, for fear that their souls would become imprisoned inside the black magic box. The fear is, perhaps, not unfounded.

And if you think this is just a pile of Luddite balderdash, I have pictures…"

T. L. McKeown
St-Adrien-d’Irlande, Québec

Thank you so much for this lovely gift, Tom.

Earth Family First,
maureen
(Photos from Google Images and family album)