Natural Aesthetics – Part Two

 

You may recall (if you are a member of that really small but obviously elite group of regular forest rat readers) that back in July I wrote a post about natural aesthetics. You can read that post here. I mentioned that I was reading a book called “The Aesthetics of Natural Environments”. This is a survey of philosophical essays discussing how we might best go about enjoying and appreciating “nature” and if there are right and wrong ways to go about it.

Ronald Hepburn kicked things off with his 1966 essay, Contemporary Aesthetics and the Neglect of Natural Beauty. Since then many people have put forth ideas about how we might begin to think about natural beauty again after a lapse of something like a hundred years or so.

Now you might think that these people are nuts. Everybody appreciates natural beauty, don’t they? Well, yes and no, but probably more no than yes.

As Hepburn points out, philosophical eggheads interested in the finer points of formal aesthetic theory have cut nature right out of their calculations. They shifted from the consideration of beauty in general to defining aesthetics as “the philosophy of art” - only man made objects need apply. Stinking college boys (and girls)!

Well, the average person on the street has not done much better. We look for nothing deeper from nature than the “Kodak Moment”. To quote Hepburn, “…for all the cult of the open air, the caravans, camps, and excursions in the family car - serious aesthetic concern with nature is today rather a rare phenomenon. If we regard the Wordsworthian vision as the great peak in the recent history of the subject, then we have to say that the ground declined very sharply indeed from that extraordinary summit…”

Allen Carlson takes up the challenge to layout some ground rules for appreciating nature in his essay Appreciation and the Natural Environment. First he lays out what we have so far in the form of two paradigms that he calls the object model and the landscape model.

The object model simplifies things by breaking everything down into individual objects. A painting or a piece of sculpture has boundaries. We can isolate that object from its surroundings and contemplate it alone. This works nicely for non-representational works. They are what they are. We can appreciate their forms, colors, and textures without needing to relate them to anything further.

The object model could be used on nature, but it has some problems. We take a rock from a stream in the woods, bring it home, and set it on the table. It is now an isolated object and can be appreciated merely for its form and beauty without the need to connect it to anything else. This is neat and clean, but it doesn’t really help us to appreciate “nature”. A visitor, not knowing where the rock came from, could think that it is an abstract sculpture that someone chiseled. It isn’t nature anymore, it is an object.

The landscape model, sometimes referred to as the picturesque model, is something with which we are all familiar. Indeed it is really about the only model the average person ever uses when encountering nature. Here nature is divided into scenes. Each scene is then appreciated as if it were a painting. The beauty of each scene is gauged by how closely it approaches the ideals of art.

We pile into the car and trek to scenic viewpoints. These view points have been pre-selected for the best arrangement of elements. A majestic snow-capped mountain in the background with maybe a lake in the foreground surrounded by maple trees for that added autumn color (if you are european, toss in an old castle on the hillside for good measure). The area has been manicured to frame the view. Parking areas and fences have been constructed for safety and convenience. We hop out, walk to the fence, snap a few pics, and head for the next location.

Once again this model does not do anything to help us appreciate nature as nature. Our view of nature is a series of landscape paintings. Another big problem with this model is that only those portions of nature that look like paintings are valued. Therefore we are free to destroy our local environments while valuing only specific places like the Rockies. We learn that it is OK to trash the world in general as long as we set aside a few picturesque sites that we can drive through once a year.

So what are we to do? Carlson has some ideas and others react to them, but I had better save that for next time. This post is too long already.

MDW

Nature’s Colors

 

I’m a color oriented person. I rarely create black and white images.

I know that many people consider black and white the only way to take real fine art type photographs and I agree that a well done black and white image is a wonderful thing.  I love black and white images and admire photographers that are able to do it well – I’m just not cut out for it.

When I’m in the woods, color is what catches my eye before anything else. I’m constantly looking for splashes of color and variations of color and blendings of color all the time that I’m walking. I see color everywhere.

There is so much color in the forest. More than most people realize. We think of the forest and we think of green and brown and black; maybe a few blue or white wildflowers cross our minds. Nothing is too exciting. Everything is very muted and dull. Nothing could be further from the truth.

The summer leaves on the trees are all green, but not all the same. Some are a dark blackish green and some are a bright yellow green and some are in between with a silvery sheen to them. Did you ever notice how many colors fungus comes in? We think they are all pasty grey, but I’ve seen red, purple, yellow, orange, and white. The sky shifts from light powdery blue at midday to deep purple blue in the evening. The stones in the stream may at first glance look just grey and black, but a closer look at them as individuals reveals blues greens oranges browns pinks. I love the iridescent green of the hummingbird and the incredibly bright red of the scarlet tanager. The forest colors are far from muted and dull. It’s no wonder that they figure prominently in my photographs.

Now color is an odd thing. It isn’t the same for everyone. Did you know that it is estimated that up to 8% of men have some form of color blindness? That’s like 12 million people in the U.S. alone. All these people could look at my photos and see a completely different set of colors than I do. Weird.

Color vision differences go beyond just crude measurments of what is considered color blindness. My wife and I often disagree on colors. The house we had in Indiana was grey – she told people it was blue. The kitchen cabinets were blue – she described them as green. It is possible that women in general see color better than men:

It’s long been known that color blindness is caused, usually in men, by changes in the red and green opsin genes, the genes that enable humans to perceive color. But a new study of randomly selected people from geographically diverse populations shows that normal variation in the red opsin gene may have been maintained by natural selection to give humans, especially women, a better perception of color.

Most human geneticists have traditionally searched for genetic variations that have large effects on color vision, such as the difference between individuals who are color-blind or not. However, says Verrelli, “Genetic variation can have very subtle effects that are difficult to measure with even the most precise equipment. For example, when looking for big differences in perception, scientists find people who distinguish between greens and reds, but may be missing the subtle variations among people who can distinguish between reds and red-oranges.”  PsycPort

…estimated that 2 percent to 3 percent of the world’s women may have the kind of fourth cone that lies smack between the standard red and green cones, which could give them a colossal range. Pittsburgh Post Gazette

Just for fun here are a couple of online tests of color vision: Farnsworth Arrangement and City University

For some more food for thought: I used an odd feature in my photo editing software that counts the number of colors in an image to analyse the photos in this post. The top photo of the water splashing over the rocks has 674,528 colors as a TIFF file. The JPG on this page only has 15,857. The moss that would seem to have very few colors actually has more; 714,823 and 34,636 respectively. Even the seemingly monochrome photo of the frozen water splash has 590,097 and 10,095.

MDW

Clouds and Sun

A night of thunderstorms – pouring rain rapping against the windows – lightning flashes flickering on the ceiling – rumblings half heard and half felt in sleep.

Then comes the morning holding the promise of sunshine, but still and grey for now. It waits for the warm sun to roll back the cool misty blankets.

I try to take some photographs. I’m not in the mood yet. The light is not right yet. So I sit on a rock. I wait for the sun.

A breeze comes up. Slowly the clouds begin to shift and swirl and thin. They tatter and break.

I begin to stir. I shake the cobwebs out of my head and the dampness from my bones. Time to take some pictures.

It is a slow day for some reason. I take many shots of the same thing – never really satisfied. I’m looking for the right light, the right angle, the right speed, and the right feel. It doesn’t come easy today.

I spend a lot of time waiting for the clouds to cooperate. Sometimes I wait for them to hide the sun – mostly I wait for them the get out of the way and let it brighten things up a bit. The light waxes and wanes, pulsing irregularly. Time and again I have to re-shoot because the light changed in the middle of an exposure.

MDW