According to Kant, art doesn’t just provide an experience of the Beautiful, but can also express the experience of the Sublime.
What is the Sublime? The sublime is the experience of the limitlessness and overwhelming power of nature.
Something that is sublime is too large for the imagination to comprehend, yet which we are able to think through reason.
These photographs of storms by photographer, Eric Nyugen, are a great example of the sublime. These photos capture the amazing, non-human force of nature. Photography has a strong connection to the sublime. Each photograph has a photographer behind the camera, so we can picture the man taking this photo, and we can picture how small he is in relation to the storm. This communicates the insignificance of human efforts in the face of the limitless power of nature.
The immediacy of photography is another way in which photography best expresses the sublime in modern culture. The vigorous emotion is captured in a single split moment, unlike a painting that takes time. No part of the experience of this moment is lost within the process of the artworks creation, as the moment is its creation.
We can paint from our imaginations, we can write a poem without an image. But, we cannot take a photograph of our imagination, and our imaginations can not conjure the sublime. In this sense, photography can effectively capture a sublime moment by communicating the limits of the imagination, and the accessibility of reason.
The Sublime is something hardly seen in many contemporary works of art, yet its presence is still dominant in a lot of photography. Photography is our new vessel for which to further explore this idea of the sublime.
PHL250 Aesthetics Journal 