Dissertation - further research
The concept of Sublime is becoming more and more complex alongside the evolution of technologies and media.
The traditional conception of Sublime is maybe defined for the first time by the Irish philosopher Edmund Burke, who in his Philosophical Enquiry into the Origins of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful (1757) tried to give a name to the feelings that the self experiences when confronted with something incommensurable, threatening, terrifying. Therefore, Burke sees the Sublime as a characteristic intrinsic of natural elements such as stormy seas, huge mountains, deep nights...
A little later Kant, in his Critique of Judgement (1790), shifts the focus from the external elements to the ones in within the human body. For him, the sublime was a way of describing what happens when the subject is confronted with something which cannot be explained by the reason. When a subject realises that what he is seeing is something bigger then himself and therefore finds himself unable to give it an explanation, then he is made aware of his incapacities, his limited powers and the limitations of his own mind.
With the evolution of new technolgies, man started to be confronted with many different realities. The ‘invention’ of photography, especially, shifted quite quickly from a medium of faithful reproduction of reality, to artistic medium.
During the first half of the 20th century, thanks to the lively artistic movements that developed (New Objectivity, Conceptualism) the role of photography has been reinscribed into many different aestethics. With the New Topographic show in 1974, landscape photography particularly, took a turn towards a conception of sublime defined as ‘mathematical’. This, related to reproduction of images of huge numbers and scale, grew quickly thanks to the industrial developements flourishing then.
By considering such form of ‘sumblimity’ of photographic imagery, it is easy to understand how many more ways of provoking such feelings are available nowadays. Possibly, every aspect of our current life has a ‘sublime side’. What sticks and stays the same and at the basis of it is the sentiment of fear, awe, insecurity, uncertainty. In modern photographic practices, this can be created in many different ways. While researching contemporary photography, I came across the work of Dan Holdsworth.