The Death Mask of the Real

(or, ​On Photography and its Relation to Fantasy and the Sublime​)

“The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out

When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi
Troubles my sight”

- W.B.Yeats, The Second Coming, 1989

If we are to arrive at some understanding of the Sublime and its relation to Photography, we must

begin briefly with a definition of it through the history of Western thought before proceeding towards

a proper analysis of the causes of that experience in art and of photography itself. This will prove to be

a challenge, as the grounds upon which one might formulate a coherent philosophy of photography

are, in my mind, rather unstable. Half a century or so of philosophical dogmatism has made of any

dialectical discussion regarding the purposes, not simply of photography, but of Art, as it was

traditionally understood, and culture, as it now stands, a source of much taboo and as such any

inquiries into the moral justifications of photography - or the impulses which led to its invention -

have made many an inquisitive mind a heretic where, in another time, he might simply have seemed a

bleating goat.

Considering the dearth of inquiry which lies before us, and the social impediments which balk our

path, we must begin, firstly, with a list of the questions which lie before our goal of understanding.

Besides the two questions formerly stated, a sensible understand must also be made of the nature and

purposes of art, as a means of representation. It is my opinion that, contrary to popular thought,

where painting is, indeed, a form of representational art, along with sculpture and literature,

photography is not, but in fact comes under the label of ‘simulacrum’. I will rely on the writings of

Roger Scruton in two essays on photography and representation, fantasy and cinema, as well as the

writings of Coleridge, Hegel and my own personal analogy of the death-mask to illustrate this point.

Once I have proven why photography is not a form of representation, we can begin to answer two

central questions: if photography is ​not ​a form of representation, can it still produce a sensation of the

sublime and, if so, does a hierarchy exist between that experience of the sublime in in painting, and in

photography? In so doing we will ascertain not simply the nature of the sublime in photography, but
of it’s intensity in relation to other existing forms. It will be the purpose of this essay to demonstrate

that the answers to both this questions is ‘yes’ and then to clearly define the nature of the origins and

purposes of both art and photography as I see them to be using the subject of the sublime as a vehicle

for that inquiry.

What is the Sublime?

The idea of the sublime goes back to ancient antiquity in the anonymous writings of a conventionally

nicknamed, Longinus. His definitions, however interesting, regard primarily the experience of the

sublime in writing and not in the plastic arts.

It is in the Irish philosopher Edmund Burke’s short work ‘A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin

of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful’ in 1757, which has been the most influential on art and

aesthetic philosophy and by which we will create a kind of definition. In his ‘Enquiry’ Burke clearly

lists every aspect of the sublime, in the order of: Terror (all things which “robs the mind of all its

powers of acting and reasoning”, the horrible and threatening), Darkness (which blackens the sight

and defeats knowing), Obscurity (causing confusion), Privation (pain which is greater in our

experience than pleasure), Vastness (the infinite and unknowable, as in an endless desert or the

interminable heavens), Magnificence (or, ‘grandeur’, that causes awe at the lofty and powerful),

Loudness (which ‘overpowers the soul’), Suddenness (which startles us). The sublime is, then, that

which paralyzes the will, confounds the senses, and bars our attempts at understanding.

In the natural world the sublime manifests in those elements and species whose domain is the night,

the cavernous, the uninhabitable: wild and dangerous storms, the great beasts of the jungle, dark,

forbidding mountains... our own unfathomable nightmares made flesh. We find them also in the

ancient and gargantuan ruins of past civilisations, in the ruins of the Temple of Delphi, in the

Colosseum, the Acropolis and the Pyramids of Egypt. Before such monuments of man’s infinite hubris,

we encounter not simply the vestiges of a mostly unknowable past, but the terrible omens of our own

inevitable downfall.
 It was Burke’s belief that the ultimate emotion producible by the sublime was ‘astonishment’ and a

kind of terrible delight at the relief one feels when one know the subject of your interest can not harm

you.

The Sublime and Painting

Although Burke was primarily concerned with the sublime as it occurred in poetry and literature, it

is during this time that painters in Britain began to employ similar ideas, as in the painting of ‘Lady

Macbeth Seizing the

Daggers’ (1812)

(fig.1) by Henry

Fuseli, where

Macbeth has just

left the room of King

Duncan, bearing the

bloody daggers he

used to murder

Duncan in his sleep.

Here the characters,

although familiar to

us through the scene

and the title, appear not like beings of flesh, but diaphanous ghouls illuminated solely by the waning

light of the moon. The room they inhabit is dark, and appears scarcely a room as a hellish

antechamber between the world of death and the world, which Lady Macbeth seems to emerge from,

of of life.

Such a desire, to represent, undisclosed to the viewer that which is at once essentially elusive, and

essentially unpaintable is at the heart of the sublime impulse in the artist. It erupts out of a desire to

denounce knowability, to scrutinise the optimism of the empirical certainties found in the

Enlightenment which arose at its height in the time of Burke’s treatise. The sublime in painting seems
to reach its imaginative zenith by the 1850’s with the creation of John Martin’s ‘Last Judgement’

trilogy where Martin attempts to portray the opening of the seven seals of The Book of Judgement

described in the Revelations of the Bible. The opening of the final seal, it is said, will incur the ultimate

wrath of God upon the world.

The first painting, ‘The Plains

of Heaven’, 1851-3 (fig.2) is a

visionary conception of heaven

taken from chapter 21 of

Revelation: 'And I saw a new

heaven and a new earth. And I,

John, saw the holy city, new

Jerusalem, coming down from

God out of heaven' (Revelation

21:1-2). The image does not

appear to represent any single

place at all, but comprises a

strange amalgam of scenes and

places into one. At the bottom

left, we see a path between a

verdant grove of trees merge on

its right with a babbling brook.

The scene appears to be below

sea-level, while simultaneously

extending into a great blue ocean,

which also merges with plain

upon plain of land mass and

mountains.

The perspectives are muddled,

as they are in ‘The Last

Judgement’, 1853 (fig.3). Here the saved and the damned are divided over a bottomless abyss,

referencing Revelations 9:2: “The star opened the pit of the Abyss, and smoke rose out of it like the

smoke of a great furnace, and the sun and the air were darkened by the smoke from the pit.” At the top

of the painting Jesus appears to have descended from heaven to bring salvation to the virtuous (many

of whom were portraits of ‘artists, poets, statesmen and philosophers’), while below his celestial

throne, the city of Jerusalem appears before the saved, almost as a vision of the promised land

described in the first painting.

It is, however, in the final image, ‘The Great Day of His Wrath’, 1851–3 (fig.4) that Martin displays

the greatness of his sublime ambition. Here the viewer descends among the damned in a dark and

bottomless pit. White lightning smites whole mountains and cities into rubble which tumbles into the

pit into a smouldering realm of smoke and lava. Here every aspect of Burke’s definition of the sublime

is included, where pain, darkness, obscurity, magnificence and the terrible implication of an endless

abyss of sorrow indeed ‘astonishes’ us, and leaves no question as to why these paintings were

describes, at the time of their first showing as as 'The most sublime and extraordinary pictures in the

world' (quoted in Wilson, p.76).

In Martin’s Judgement series, we encounter the limits - perhaps the apotheosis - of the painterly

sublime, where the accumulated vision of destruction, fear and anguish encompasses the view in a

world beyond his own. At the core of his creation, however, is an imaginative experiment in

perspective, subject matter, prophecy and representation, outdoing in it’s grandeur anything

conceivable to the eye of painter and, nay, any camera. Here we arrive at a conceptual impasse, where

the descriptive prowess of the photograph must concede to the imaginative rapture of the artist and in

the following section we will attempt to defining the terms of that impasse.

Aesthetic Representation
In order to define an understanding of the sublime in photography, we must first come to an

understanding about the nature of the aesthetic in art, and the manner of it’s departure in

photography, if indeed their ends are different.

 In the 19th century German philosopher Friedrich Hegel’s ‘Introductory Lecrures on Aesthetics’ we

may come to some rudimentary explanation regarding the end, or objective of artistic aesthetics in a

section entitled, ‘The Interest or End of Art’. Here Hegel challenges the idea that the value in the

plastic arts are found in their imitative quality, as a sophistic form of mimesis in the human animal

concluding that, “As a matter of mere imitation, art cannot maintain a rivalry with nature, and, if it

tries, must look like a worm chasing after an elephant.” Instead he suggests that the end of art is in

the “dragging of the heart through the whole significance of life” by offering to man a purely

contemplative experience divorced from day-to-day activities.

The artist is no so much concerned with detailing, with virtuosic accuracy, the innumerable

particulars of his subject as it appears to him. Instead, his interests are, in the words of the English

Romantic poet, Samuel Coleridge, a kind of ‘esemplastic’ (meaning, ‘to shape into one’) imagination, a

process whereby the the artist moulds or synthesises two or more disparate or opposing elements

(ideas, subjects, themes, motifs) into a coherent whole, thereby estranging the viewer from his own

experience towards a world in which every detail is communicative of a higher, symbolic meaning.

The ‘esemplastic’ process is contrasted to ‘fancy’ or fantasy, where the descriptive talents of the

artist merely imitate the sense data of his experience. By unifying these elements, the artists ​composes

a new reality, one which transcends the constituent particulars of his interest and of the ​prima

materia​ of the subjects he desibes. This makes it possible to conjoin, accentuate, enlarge or minimise

any subject to his will. John Martin’s images are, for instance, a composite of types - landscape

painting, portraiture, architectural - but the types exist not before the artists, but as disembodied

forms in his memory, yearning for realisation. In this sense, the artistic impulse is hubristic, even

Frankensteinian - borne from a desire to rival God’s creative powers with his own.

We see the contrasts between fantasy and representation most clearly when looking at the

differences between death masks and other forms of representation. In the death mask of William

Blake, made by James Deville in 1823 (fig.5), we find a perfect presentation of William Blake’s visage

that describes with absolute sincerity the appearance of his face, while saying absolutely nothing of the

person underneath. It is not for nothing that the most palpable difference between death or life masks

and sculptures is that in sculptures the eyes are open, revealing to the onlooker something of his

character, while, due to the imprinting nature of the masking process, where clay is placed over the
entirety of the person’s face, his eyes must be closed, depicting the man, even in life, as a spiritless

husk, a body without soul.

A sculpture is, unlike a death mask, made periodically over many months, forming a kind of

composite idea of the subject. The aim of that art - and of all representational art - is, then, to extract

form its subject the soul of the thing/ being embodied in appearances in a manner recognisable to all.

In the painting of William Blake (fig.6) by Thomas Phillips, 1807, we are invited to consider the nature

of the man depicted through everything the painting does. William Blake is depicted as a man of noble

character, eyes gazing perspicaciously towards some visionary ideal above and beyond him out of the

darkness in which he is sat. His pen in hand, we are made to conjecture as to the occupation of this

noble character - he must certainly be a man of letters, or a great artist, solemn and intelligent as this

painting suggests. Whether this is, or is not, a precise presentation of the physical qualities of the man,

it is the interior qualities which lie ​beneath ​the painting which inform us about ​who h
​ e ​is ​and not

simply about ​how ​he ​appears,​ but this can only be done by returning to the conventions of the

medium - through established gestures and forms - so that what is communicated about the subject is

interpretable to the audience.

 In a photograph, however, not unlike a death mask, the subjects recorded are done so by a machine,

and are therefore incapable of revealing the intentions of the photographer. A photograph selects a

reproduces, rather than represents, a semblance or likeness of the subject, but does not recreate,

through esemplastic imagination, scenes or events by which the onlooker may contemplate the soul of

things expressed in, what Robert Adams calls ‘irreducible metaphor’. This is because there is nothing

inhere in the given thing - in observable phenomena - that point to itself as a metaphor or symbol of

something other than itself. Gertrude Stein’s famous ‘a rose is a rose is a rose’ is, in the context of

photography correct, as the act of identifying the impressive qualities in the subject of a photograph is

peculiar to that subject - be it a rose or anything else - in particular.

In other words, the beauty of a tree in a Carlton Watkins photograph is inherent in that tree itself,

and not in the photograph created of it. It is the object of high art, however, to represent the essential

qualities in all trees, making of the particular an archetype of the idea of that subject. In Jung’s The

Archetype and the Collective Unconscious we are introduced to a similar idea when he says to use that

primitive man’s unconscious psyche has “an irresistible urge to assimilate all sense experience to

inner, psychic happening”. As such the sun does not simply rise and fall, for him, but in fact must

represent a greater god, or hero who “dwells nowhere except in the soul of man”.

It is my argument that photographs, while revealing with unparalleled clarity the ​prima materia​ of

appearance, is essentially incapable of that “inner, psychic happening” which we interpret in the

events we experience. The ‘collective unconscious’, is, for Jung, “a common psychic substrate of a

suprapersonal nature which is present in every one of us”, similar in a sense to the ‘Spiritus Mundi’

described in irish poet W.B. Yeats’s poem The Second Coming (1989) - it is the universal wellspring of

eternal images revealed to the poet or the artistic genius. From the collective unconscious emerge

“primordial types… universal images that have existed since the remotest times.” The ‘esemplastic’

process, described by Coleridge, is that process by which these archetypal types are selected, guided by

the imagination towards artistic representation. In so doing, ‘The Poet’ is conflated with ‘The Seer’ or

‘The Prophet’ (as in the portrait of Blake), and the mythic images of ‘God’ as immaterial creator, the

patria potestas ​(“power of the father”) incarnate, is conflated with His final judgement, ‘The End of

the World’ and “Eternal Retribution” in the paintings of Martin.

 It is not self-evident, therefore, that the quality we call ‘sublime’, if it is observed in a photograph, is

divisible from the sublime qualities we observe in the subject depicted. While such a thing can easily

be said of painting (we are reminded by Martha Schwendener in an essay on the sublime in painting

and photography, that many of the Hudson River School painters, like Albert Bierstadt in such

paintings as ‘Looking Down Yosemite Valley’,1865 (fig.7), “weren’t made outdoors. Many of them were

painted in the Tenth Street Studio Building in Lower Manhattan.”), it is not so obvious, however, the

extent to which the photographer has affected our experience of the sublime subject through the use of

his camera.
BIBLIOGRAPHY

Burke, Edmund. A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful,
Oxford, Oxford University Press, 3rd edition, pp. 53-79, 2008

Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich. Introductory Lectures on Aesthetics, New York, Penguin Books, pp.
46-52, 1993

Jung, Carl. The Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious, Abingdon, Routledge; 2 edition, pp. 4-15,
1991

Kant, Immanuel. Observations on the Feeling of the Beautiful and Sublime, Chicago, Illonois,
University of California Press, 2Rev Ed edition, pp. 45-50, 2004

https://brooklynrail.org/2015/11/criticspage/notes-on-landscapepaintingphotographythe-sublime​,
Landscape/Painting/Photography/the Sublime, Martha Schwendener, 2015

Scruton, Roger. Photography and Representation, Critical Inquiry, Vol. 7, Chicago, Illonois, The
University of Chicago Press 1981, pp. 577-603

Scruton, Roger. ‘Fantasy, Imagination and the Screen, St Augustine's Press, 2nd Edition, Indiana, pp.
149-159, 2001

https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/martin-the-last-judgement-t01927​, The Last Judgement,

Simon Wilson, Tate Gallery - an illustrated companion, London 1990, p.76