Melancholic Dispositions: Landscape, Architecture, Photography, Phenomenology
Melancholy is an aesthetic sensibility, a love of loss, of longing. Within the phenomenology of photography the distance becomes shaped in light and dark, sculpted, palpable. Infused with the ache of absence, photographs of landscape and architecture are portals to the fugitive moments of melancholy. The paradox of the desire for distance, for longing, is an echo of the Sublime's love of awe, a necessary fear. Photography becomes the liminal zone that is the surface of phenomenological condensation, remembering the root of ‘aesthetic,' in aisthesis, in the breathing-in of the world. Photographs are a site of relay between invisible and visible, a ‘crossing of the visible'. Inherent in the work of Michael Kenna (English, based in USA), Hiroshi Sugimoto (Japanese, based in USA), Patrick Reynolds (New Zealand) and Anne Noble (New Zealand) is a profound sense of the metaphysics of melancholy. Working in black and white, the images sculpt light and darkness, intuiting senses. Noble's photographs are "sliced from blocks of sheer light," and Kenna's "insist[] on the existence of a phantom presence within reality." The photographer, like the painter, contributes to the phenomenological rendering of the visible, where in the words of Jean-Luc Marion, "He deepens a seam or fault line, in the night of the inapparent, in order to extract, lovingly or more often by force, with strokes and patches of color, blocks of the visible." There is a spirituality which saturates these surfaces, as in Noble's photographs where: "black the extreme absence of light evoking the darkness of suspicion, doubt, despair ... white the overwhelming presence of light, announcing revelation, exaltation, bliss", and that white is apprehended as a "spiritual value." In Reynolds' work, "Vision is burdened with a corporeal melancholy," and in Kenna's there is "an aura of intense melancholy," both hovering within the ether of perception. Against the grain of technique, Sugimoto's out-of-focus architectural images and Reynolds' vignetted shots from a disposable camera, bring form to the foreground. The reduction of technique is a means of bypassing artificial nostalgia, avoiding the mannered use of introduced sepia tones or distressing of the surface which are often used to, as Noble puts it, "hurry an image into pathos." Instead these photographs, these sites, suggest a melancholy topology, inhabiting the zone of the subconscious, calling to mind both the reverie of Bachelard, and the dreamwork of Freud. In reverie, in dreams, in the liminal zone of the photograph, the double pull of melancholy is felt. At once pushing and pulling, intimate and immense, a withdrawal from the world of things and presencing of that very world, and within such doubling a realisation of what Bachelard has termed a "penumbral ontology." It is within this penumbral place that the phenomenology of melancholy dwells.
References
Bachelard, Gaston. (1969). The Poetics of Space. New York: Beacon Press.
Jenkinson, Megan. (1981) Anne Noble: Landscapes & Portraits. Art New Zealand, 20: 54-55.
Keith, Sheridan. (1983). Anne Noble's Wanganui. Art New Zealand, 27: 24-25.
Kenna, Michael; Bunnell, Peter C.; Bernhard, Ruth. (2002). Michael Kenna: A Twenty Year Retrospective. Tuscon: Nazzraeli Press.
Marion, Jean-Luc. (2004). The Crossing of the Visible. Trans. James K.A. Smith. (originally in French, La Croisée du Visible, 1996, Presses Universitaires de France). Stanford: Stanford University Press.
Paton, Justin; (ed). (2001). Anne Noble: States of Grace. Dunedin: Dunedin Public Art Gallery; Wellington: Victoria University Press.
Smith, Allan. (1992). Romanticist and Symbolist Tendencies in Recent New Zealand Photography. Art New Zealand, 64: 80-84, 111.
