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. For sure, with the proper distance, framing, and visual arrangement, some sense of order might emerge from a seemingly chaotic scene, but moving into space only will quickly show limits.
Very often, the underlying pattern of a place requires a specific set of conditions to be found. The right season will ensure the proper amount of leaves, the perfect length of the grass, the appropriate colors contrast, or bring the delicate rhythm of frost to the edge of fallen leaves. The right weather, at the right time of the day, at the right day of the year, can bring texture and repetition to an otherwise disorganized scene. Wind, rain, water, or any living being interactions, might help to arrange the elements in the proper way, such as neatly aligned waves, water puddles forging symmetry after a storm, or perfectly bent common reeds. 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!
Actively searching for those hidden patterns is one of my favorite ways of contemplating a landscape. As soon as some interesting symmetry, movement or repetition presents itself, I rarely can resist pointing my camera at it. More often than not, I realize that the result focuses on a single proposition: a material, a color, a movement, a repetition of shapes, or any kind of visual rhythm. As a result, working on this collection of images sometimes felt like extracting building blocks of the landscape in front of me, or sometimes like building my own personal version of the periodic (or rather, seasonal !) table of elements, long-buried in my schoolboy memory. It immediately sounded like an appropriate title for this portfolio, an entertaining tentative of photography-rationalism, should such a thing make any kind of sense!
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. For sure, with the proper distance, framing, and visual arrangement, some sense of order might emerge from a seemingly chaotic scene, but moving into space only will quickly show limits.
Very often, the underlying pattern of a place requires a specific set of conditions to be found. The right season will ensure the proper amount of leaves, the perfect length of the grass, the appropriate colors contrast, or bring the delicate rhythm of frost to the edge of fallen leaves. The right weather, at the right time of the day, at the right day of the year, can bring texture and repetition to an otherwise disorganized scene. Wind, rain, water, or any living being interactions, might help to arrange the elements in the proper way, such as neatly aligned waves, water puddles forging symmetry after a storm, or perfectly bent common reeds. 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!
Actively searching for those hidden patterns is one of my favorite ways of contemplating a landscape. As soon as some interesting symmetry, movement or repetition presents itself, I rarely can resist pointing my camera at it. More often than not, I realize that the result focuses on a single proposition: a material, a color, a movement, a repetition of shapes, or any kind of visual rhythm. As a result, working on this collection of images sometimes felt like extracting building blocks of the landscape in front of me, or sometimes like building my own personal version of the periodic (or rather, seasonal !) table of elements, long-buried in my schoolboy memory. It immediately sounded like an appropriate title for this portfolio, an entertaining tentative of photography-rationalism, should such a thing make any kind of sense!
October 2021
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