Picturesque, Romantic, Sublime and Modernist

Today our Merry Band went to Sherwood Forest and Nottingham in quest the spirit of Robin Hood. As we have been studying the different genres of perception, in addition to studying the interpretations of the the Robin Hood Cycle by visiting the locations associated with him, the visual assignment for today was to take four photographs in Sherwood. One should communicate the picturesque (merely pretty), one should embody Romantic Ideas (strong emotion, emphasis on the individual experience of the world), the Sublime (images that are bigger than the individual, an element of horror mixed with beauty that pulls us out of ourselves and into the greatness of the divine), and finally a modernist image (one that not only makes you feel, but also makes you think). Here are my photos in this conceptual essay.

For the picturesque, I am strongly attracted to the landscape, but also the human participation in the landscape. What could be more pleasing to the eye than two young ladies enjoying a forest stroll. It almost has an Austen-like feel to it in the symmetry and natural setting of good friends having a proper chat.

For the Romantic, I think if you take the people out of the scene, then the viewer becomes the inhabitant of the image, and the path becomes an emotional location for the unknown and the adventure, rather like Kiplings "something lost behind the mountains, lost and waiting for you, Go!". Thus, the winding forest path is a Romantic image for me. Also, making it black and white seems to make it more evocative because it seems less real and more like imaginative food.

Another Romantic image I saw that I found profoundly moving was this oak tree that had clearly seen better days at least a hundred years ago, but which was still refusing to die. This tree heroism, I felt, was quite striking. I thought of that famous sculpture, The Dying Gaul, and figured that this tree was just an arboreal Dying Gaul who just would not die. Byron wrote a poem mythologizing an oak tree as surviving long after the brief of the poet was given up. In a poem, To an Oak at Newstead, he complains that the little oak is decaying. Hey, dude, check this tree out: decay might make an attempt on a oak, but it takes more than a little decay to do a Real Oak in.

The modernist ideas were interesting to consider. I finally went for the modernist idea that we interpret what we see as symbols representing reality. To play with this kind of reality, like Magritte's "Ce N'est Pas Une Pipe" picture, this image from inside the visitor's center seemed like an hysterical commentary on the foolishness of modernism. This is not the forest, this is a fire extinguisher, there is and is not danger here from fire. I was entertained by the conceptual twisting this image created for me.

But finding an image of the submlime was the most challenging of all. I think that because the sublime is something that extracts a person from herself, and causes a feeling of awe or the melancholy of beauty or the hand of the divine, it is really hard to photograph. I came up image after image of the sublime in the forest, but as soon as I tried to take a picture, it was lost. I found that maybe, to photograph the sublime, I needed to get small, not large, and these foxgloves seems to move towards the sublime. But to truly find an image of the sublime, I think the picture of it itself is not going to really work. In film, they know that if they want to really creep out the audience, they show a character reacting to the horror, not the horror itself, so that the more powerful imagination of the viewer can conjure its own special image of what is happening. This little gargoyle provided me with the perfect reaction to the sublime, so she is my image to represent the perception of the sublime.