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Three. Armor and Aesthesis: The Picturesque in Difference
- University of Minnesota Press
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107 three Armor and Aesthesis The Picturesque in Difference Psychoanalysis does not make freedom impossible; it teaches us to think of this freedom concretely, as a creative repetition of ourselves, always, in retrospect, faithful to ourselves. —Maurice Merleau-Ponty, “Cézanne’s Doubt” Picture Almost Perfect We are leaving the scenes of –, and in this chapter I extend the discussion of anaesthesis in the context of the entirely different genre of landscape photography. Because the Sepoy Revolt continued to resonate in British India into the twentieth century, the arrangements of perception and meaning making explored in the previous chapters on the photography of the revolt will continue to haunt the discussions of aesthetics in this chapter and the next. From scenes of violence and ruins we turn to scenes of picturesque vistas of nature. In the 1860s Samuel Bourne undertook several treks into the far reaches of the Himalayas, and in the course of photographing the sublime peaks he saw there he confronted a singularly difficult challenge: how to represent , within a photographic frame, the sheer scale of the immensity that surrounded him. This challenge was both epistemological and practical: In some places the precipitous walls are so stupendous as to stagger both the sense and imagination. . . . With scenery like this it is very difficult to deal with the camera: it is altogether too gigantic and stupendous to be brought within the limits imposed on photography. Even the much-vaunted “globe lens” would find itself unequal to extend its great divergence over these mighty subjects, and compress their rays on the few square inches of a collodion plate. . . . The grand difficulty I had to contend with was to find a standing place for tent and camera.1 Encapsulating the rational laws of perspective in its very function, the camera, of necessity, must be located in a definite space: What to do when the best armor and aesthesis 108 vista is to be seen from midair or halfway down a fall? Where is the foothold, or standing place, from which Bourne may capture the infinite images unfolding before him? As Merleau-Ponty writes in his discussion of Paul Cézanne, “Expressing what exists is an endless task.”2 How might such infinity—itself found in our experience of all objects but accentuated by mountain vistas— make its way into the photographic frame? For Bourne, God becomes a solace more powerful than his faith in the globe lens or in the rationality of the photographic image and more appropriate to the landscape than the meager understandings of the human mind, here linked to the limits of the camera. God provides the possibility of meaning as well as the knowledge that that meaning is outside mortal grasp: What a mighty upbearing of mountains! What an endless vista of gigantic ranges and valleys, untold and unknown! Peak rose above peak, . . . range above and beyond range, innumerable and boundless, until the mind refused to follow the eye in its attempt to comprehend the whole in one grand conception . . . . It was impossible to gaze upon this tumultuous sea of mountains without being deeply affected, . . . without an elevation of the soul’s capacities , and without a silent uplifting of the heart to Him who formed such stupendous works, whose eye alone has scanned the dread depths of their sunless recesses, and whose presence only has rested on their mysterious and sublime elevations.3 Capturing the totality of the seemingly infinite prospect and his own experience of it is, quite literally, outside the scope of Bourne’s lens. What is photography ’s role in understanding the kind of sublimity that can be knowable in just one glance by God? Bourne continues: And it must be put down to the credit of photography that it teaches the mind to see the beauty and power of such scenes as these, and renders it more susceptible of their sweet and elevating impressions. For my own part, I may say that before I commenced photography I did not see half the beauties in nature that I do now, and the glory and power of a precious landscape has often passed before me and left but a feeble impression on my untutored mind; but it will never be so again.4 If God is the creator of such extraordinary vistas, then the camera is the tutor that trains us to see them, to be sensitized to their sweet and elevating impressions. Bourne quite...