Elements
“Nothing in Nature is random… A thing appears random only through the incompleteness of our knowledge”
For sure Spinoza was not thinking about photography - nor about visual arts at all - when he presented his rationalism to the world, a few centuries before the first negative was ever exposed. Nevertheless, I’ve been playing around with the weird idea of applying the above statement to nature and landscape photography. Could it be that, with the proper knowledge, every branch or tree, every bit of grass or rock, every sea or mountain, could be made part of a bigger, harmonious, visually pleasing pattern?
At a first glance, it’s all but obvious: natural elements usually appear randomly placed with little to no tangible rationale. But very often, that is only because the underlying pattern of a place requires a specific set of conditions to be found, whether it be the right season, weather, time of the day, day of the year, etc. In other words, structure not only arises from space and positioning within it, but also with time, context, and interactions of the landscape with all external events. This makes Spinoza’s precept, loosely applied to landscape photography, such an entertaining axiom: one can never be sure that, in any given place, a pattern is not quietly waiting for the proper conditions to be discovered!
October 2021
For sure Spinoza was not thinking about photography - nor about visual arts at all - when he presented his rationalism to the world, a few centuries before the first negative was ever exposed. Nevertheless, I’ve been playing around with the weird idea of applying the above statement to nature and landscape photography. Could it be that, with the proper knowledge, every branch or tree, every bit of grass or rock, every sea or mountain, could be made part of a bigger, harmonious, visually pleasing pattern?
At a first glance, it’s all but obvious: natural elements usually appear randomly placed with little to no tangible rationale. But very often, that is only because the underlying pattern of a place requires a specific set of conditions to be found, whether it be the right season, weather, time of the day, day of the year, etc. In other words, structure not only arises from space and positioning within it, but also with time, context, and interactions of the landscape with all external events. This makes Spinoza’s precept, loosely applied to landscape photography, such an entertaining axiom: one can never be sure that, in any given place, a pattern is not quietly waiting for the proper conditions to be discovered!
October 2021
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