Holidays and Rituals

The Most Wonderful Time of the Year

We may not even think about why we are doing what we are doing, but the accompanying feelings compel us. We have looked forward to it for weeks. This was supposed to be a time of rest, but we make ourselves as busy as ever—even more so, but with few complaints other than the hassle of the inevitable competition in dodging others around us doing the same. Not everyone is equally enthused, but everyone takes part in some way.

We dress in clothes reserved or newly purchased for the occasion. We make appointments with friends and family, and if we are lucky, we even have to send regrets or prepare for serious juggling due to an overabundance of invitations. We buy appropriate foods, some available only this time of year, and we plan long days in our kitchens, looking forward to the culinary projects, perhaps following newly discovered recipes, but more often revisiting long-held family traditions.

Some people are not so lucky. They might feel the social void in their lives even more in these periods. It might bring focus to past losses, times that felt happier, especially linked to such occasions. Others might huddle alone at the fringes of their social world, lacking a family, sufficient wealth or even home. But they too might absorb some of the additionally warmed air and light generated to overcome the cold and darkness. They might also be more readily recognized as a person in the generosity of the season. More likely to receive a helping hand or a greeting, when otherwise they are invisible.

As I write this I am surrounded by cut and decorated trees that at any other time of year would be incongruous in this indoor space, lit in a carefree wealth of colors, decorated with dangling bulbs that reflect the light further, and by strings of false gold and silver that complete the opulence. The mall is busy with shoppers, the café buzzing with those taking a break from shopping or meeting with friends in this convenient social place, the market. The Polish skies are a thick grey, making it difficult to say what time of day it is, only that it is a new day straining to show itself for a few hours. It is the day after Christmas in fact, but the festive atmosphere continues.

Christmas in Amman, Jordan   Photo by Patrick Parrish

Christmas music continues in the background, the same songs heard for nearly a week in a near constant loop, only now slowly being replaced by non-holiday music. “It’s the most wonderful time of the year,” I am told repeatedly, convincingly by a mellifluous voice. And in many ways it is. Somehow, even in the deep cold of winter, with daylight occupying only a third of each 24 hours, very little green in the landscape, and a nearly constant light precipitation that alternates between rain and snow, it does feel like the most wonderful time of the year. This message is repeated in not just the music, but in the tones of voices people use, in the bright and colorful lights, and in the abundant family feasts each day. There is little time for a lack of wonder in this relentless flow.

Some holidays are ”natural,” emerging from the rhythmic flow of life. In this case, it is the darkness and natural retreat of the northern hemisphere winter. Others are “artificial,” designated to celebrate historic events, like national independence or other historic social events. Secular holidays like these are welcome, but not as natural or compelling. They are just dates on the calendar--excuses for a long weekend. The ones with deep roots, the “holy days,” motivated by timeless myths and natural events, seem to emerge inevitably from their times of year.

Holidays are rituals that for most of us have nearly lost their original meanings. Or perhaps these meanings are superfluous anyway, accumulated through the years to further the rituals that predate their surface meanings. There may be evolutionary motives underlying some holidays.

The study of human rituals, like those associated with holiday celebrations, emerged surprisingly from the study of animal behaviors (Stephenson, 2015). When 19th century ethologists recognized animal behaviours that reminded them of stylized rituals—postures or “dances” conducted for communication or community-definition rather than instrumental ends, the connection to human behavior was unavoidable. Ritual was the only concept that seemed to fit to certain complex courtship behaviours or displays of power. Since this time, the definition of “ethology” has expanded to include the biological study of human behaviour, and sociologists, anthropologists and related scholars have further studied with new perspective the numerous formalized patterns of behavior used throughout human communities and passed down through generations. These behaviours, many of which are likely biologically as well as culturally based, have also been offered as one possible origin of the arts. It is assumed that rituals, being simpler and requiring fewer resources, preceded the making of the artefacts that we currently think of as Art (Dissanayake, 1995).

Art making and appreciation as a form of ritual is an appropriate attribution. The relation of ritual to the arts and aesthetic experiences are their assertiveness, their formality, and the value-added meaning provided. Rituals are a way of engaging in the world partially on its terms (the situation calling for celebration) and partially on our own terms (our choices of ritual acts, either individually or communally chosen). They involve anticipation, preparation, and attention at many levels, not just visual appreciation, but also physical and social action--agency, not passive reception. Most obviously, rituals have a pattern that plays out, with a beginning, middle and end, sometimes more directly enacting a sort of story, sometimes just following through on an expected and carefully executed sequence of actions whose meaning is secondary to the care of execution and need for culmination. In some cultures, rituals are included in the list of traditional arts, such as the Japanese Tea Ceremony. Most martial arts have rituals associated with them as well, ones intended to show respect and humility, and not displays of power. Many artists have their own personal rituals used to guide them in making art (Currey, 2013). Several forms of traditional sandpainting, most famously that of Tibetan monks, are more ritual than what we think of as works of Art, even though a product is at least temporarily produced. Tibetan sandpaintings, however, are destroyed upon completion, the ritual having achieved its purpose, an enactment that symbolizes impermanence. While the process of art making can be ritual, this does not make all ritual Art.

Holiday Rituals

That many holiday rituals are associated with changing seasons, or peak celestial events like the solstices and equinoxes, is not difficult to understand. Even in the tropics, where days do not change so much in length over the year, seasons are determined by the onset of relatively rainy and dry periods, which also drive rituals. These climatological periods or celestial events have a deep influence on human behaviour and emotion, and how the initiation of these times transpires can be considered omens of coming success or failure. Note that the Western versions of these holidays originated in the northern latitudes, so their parallels do not line up with those south of the equator.

Holidays, as their name implies, are often connected to religious practices, since the coming seasons themselves are beyond our ability to affect and in the hands of fate or gods. But the associated rituals are a way of attempting human influence. These rituals can be quite serious and far from passive entertainment, meeting one of Dewey’s (1934) criteria for art, and perhaps even meeting the criteria for “great art” (Hildebrand, 2015), given their timelessness and transferability across locations and cultures. Yet rituals, while definitely aesthetic, are not quite the same as Art, which involves agency and/or contingency, and not predictability. But this statement leaves a nagging doubt I will come back to later.

Winter Solstice (e.g., Saturnalia, Christmas, Yule, Hanukkah, Saint-Sylvestre, New Year’s Eve and Day)

Winter is difficult, as anyone living above or below of about 35 degrees North or South latitude knows fully well. In the depths of 21 December, when the sun is at its nadir of influence (in the north), despair is understandable. Cold temperatures and snow that force one indoors can lead to claustrophobic feelings, even “cabin fever.” Low levels of sunlight, exasperated by cloudy weather, is known to cause the mild depression known as “seasonally affective disorder.” But human rituals are perhaps at their strongest during these times in response. Many important holy days occur, times to remind ourselves of the gifts of deities (sometimes associated with their births or deaths) and promoting a hopefulness toward the future. In the darkest days, we gather to share communal feelings and good will, personal gifts to those closest to us and family feasts. We light up the dark skies with decorative baubles, and make more use of candles. We use more positive greetings, which can be as simple and generic as “Happy Holidays” or “Bonnes Fetes,” or more specific, depending on our degree of religious faith. Most notably, we spend money, accounting for the phrase “Black Friday” or the day after American Thanksgiving, as the day retailers become profitable for the year (or “in the black” ink in their accounting ledgers). We make the most of what we have, and some people even go into debt in over-generosity in expectation of a wealthy year to come. Winter holidays bring symbols of prosperity within what might otherwise feel like hopelessness.

New Year's Eve in Geneva, Switzerland   Photo by Patrick Parrish

Spring Equinox (e.g., Easter, Passover, Walpurgisnacht, May Day, April Fool’s Day)

In Spring hope is renewed. The greening of spring and the possibility inherent in the planting of new crops bring thoughts of rebirth. Spring is associated with fertility rituals, preparing for the prosperity in the growth seasons of Spring and Summer (although more birthdays actually occur in September). In Christian societies it is the time of Easter, and among Jewish, it is the time of Passover, celebrating the Exodus of the Children of Israel, and the forming of a new nation.

Spring is a time of processions and sanctity, even more than the Winter holidays, because it is the symbol of the proof of God’s status. It is also a time of fasting, perhaps linked to the extinguished stores of winter food, before the new crops are available. The Spring holidays extend into May, when Maypole rituals rather conspicuously celebrate fertility with the phallic symbol, a practice captured in one of Nathaniel Hawthorne’s most famous stories in his collection of Twice-Told Tales. The practice of coloring and sharing Easter eggs also likely originated as a fertility symbol, but also has gained Christian connotations.

Easter in Mallorca  Photo by Patrick Parrish

Ironically, Spring is also a time of fasting, because it is the time when last year's preserved food supplies may be running short. This is preceded, of course, by a final day of extravagant eating, the Mardi Gras, or Fat Tuesday (or some other day of the week, Thursday in many cultures). Feasting and fasting are two of the most common ways to affect our experience of the world, creating altered states of mind, but they also have ritual, biological, and practical bases.

Summer Solstice (Midsummer's Day)

Summer is a time of abundance--food, sun, drink, and the resultant energy. Midsummer festivals are rituals of music, dancing, and food--along with general abandon.

The Flaming Lips at Vida Festival  Photo by Maja Kuna-Parrish

They are also tributes to the beauty and abilities of the body, not only with sparse clothing worn at music festivals and on beaches, but through athletic events. (The early Olympic games combined the two, with nudity being common during much of its ancient period.)

While sports are carried out year round thanks to indoor venues, they flourish during the summer--amateur and professional alike. Sports can be a significant component of rituals, and an individual sport contains many specific rituals, from a coin flip, choice of attire, and the entry to the game. Penalties are imposed for violating ritual behavior. The Olympics are originally an event held near the summer solstice, and in fact a highly ritualized tribute to Zeus. Yet anthropologists generally do not consider sports to be rituals in themselves due to the randomness inherent in its play and outcomes.

Autumn Equinox (Rosh ha-Shanah, Yom Kippur, Thanksgiving, Halloween, Dia de los Muertos, All Saints' Day)

If Summer holidays are about exuberance, Autumn holidays make a strong contrast with their subdued and internal focused. They are more meditative. These are the most of holy of Jewish holidays, times of introspection and repentance. But this is also the time of the final harvest, and a time of reflection before the days of darkness and limited resources ahead. Harvest festivals, like Thanksgiving, offer thanks for all that has been made available during the year.

Autumn holidays are also reflective the coming darkness with their focus on death and honoring ancestors, as with All Saints Day. This time of year was considered by Celtic peoples to blur the boundaries between the living and the dead. Halloween is an outcome of this focus, with its celebration of spirits and other dark side manifestations, intended to ward off the most evil spirits, but welcome those that might help predict the future given their knowledge of the other side. Halloween, which began as the Celtic Samhain, is marked by bonfires as offerings to the spirits, and by decorations and costumes that recall the dead.

Art and Ritual

I have warned against leaping to the conclusion that rituals are a form of Art, even though this is a tempting idea, especially given the grandeur of Easter processions, color of Buddhist monasteries and eloquence of Japanese Tea Ceremonies. Several times in this blog, I have also suggested that questions that try to define what is and is not Art are relatively useless, because one can almost always find counterexamples. If we ask instead, “What experiences have the potential to be aesthetic?,” the answers are less difficult to challenge, and in this case, ritual fits well the criteria offered.

Buddhist Temple   Photo by Maja Kuna

Rituals are no doubt opportunities to express intent, be present, and offer openness and trust. They are also situations with immediate, compelling, resonant, and coherent qualities. However, a question comes when we consider the situational requirement of malleability, the ability to assert agency and make a situation our own. This aspect of ritual has been questioned by those who argue that ritual requires a commitment to give up authorship of your own actions (Stephenson, 2015). Rituals are a form of template or guide to action that allow for little personal modification if they are true to the spirit of ritual. This conclusion would be damning to any consideration of ritual as art.

But as Stephenson (2015) goes on to show, others argue that simple actions, even repetitive, scripted actions, even spoken or chanted words, can have “the potential and power to impact one’s intentions, emotions, feelings, and beliefs.” Ritual has a performance aspect not unlike theatre and dance, and does leave room for interpretation, at least internally, and certainly leaves room for developing new attitudes or states of mind over time. In fact, it is not working if one is just “going through the motions.” This is one of the primary reasons for conducting rituals, to shape our lives and ourselves.

Holiday celebrations are special forms of rituals in that they are widely and simultaneously practiced. They arise from the pervasive ambiance created by a broader community, by seasonal characteristics, and by our biological nature responding to these.

References

Dewey, John (1934/1989) Art as Experience. In Jo Ann Boydston (ed.), The Collected Works of John Dewey, 1882-1953, Volume 10. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press.

Dissanayake, Ellen (1995) Homo aestheticus. Seattle: University of Washington Press.

Hildebrand, David (2015) Art is not entertainment: John Dewey’s Pragmatist defense of an aesthetic distinction, Southwest Philosophy Review, (31/1), January 2015, pp. 225 - 234, DOI: 10.5840/swphilreview201531123.

Stephenson, Barry (2015) Ritual: A very short introduction. New York: Oxford University Press.

Homemaking

I have a small Persian carpet lying next to my bed that I purchased on a trip to Iran a few years ago. I bought it in one of the dozens of carpet shops lining the main path through a central, covered marketplace--a village-sized center where my Iranian colleague had recommended we could get a good deal. With my colleague’s help, the shopkeeper displayed carpet after carpet lifted from piles that rose up to our shoulders, for more than 20 minutes, until I was convinced of my choices. The carpets available ranged from those costing thousands, large enough to fill a room and sufficiently detailed, colorful, and imaginatively designed to overwhelm the senses. I was traveling with carry-on luggage for my three-day visit, and wanted only a small addition for my very small apartment.

Photo by Patrick Parrish

What I purchased probably surprised everyone. While one carpet I chose showed a traditional geometric pattern, deep blue with golden paisley teardrops, what I considered my true find of the day was a less-traditional, almost primitive-looking small red carpet no larger than a welcome mat, lacking fully straight edges (which to me helps to show its handmade origins), covered with rough depictions of regional animals--birds, a wild cat, deer, a camel, and some difficult to discern--irregularly distributed among vegetation rather than arranged symmetrically. I loved many other options, but I knew somehow that I would come to prize this curious piece. I later learned that this design had a tradition dating back to the 18th century, originating in the practice of reproducing pictorial elements found in ancient ruins.

I step barefooted onto this carpet each morning after waking, and its comfort and warmth is welcome each night as well. It also softens the creaking of the old wooden floors. I don’t always look at it directly, but it is a lot more than something soft to step on. It has become part of my home, and will travel with me to my next home. Somehow, this foreign object is now a part of me.

Photo by Patrick Parrish

This is how it goes: We move through life slowly filling our homes with the things we need and that catch our eye, not unlike birds building a nest, incorporating those that feel potentially meaningful. Some are beautiful from the outset, bursting with meaning. Then others (but certainly not all) grow even more meaningful as we encounter them repeatedly. Some we might consider to be pieces of Art, but others just pieces of life. They attach themselves to us in significant ways--slowly insinuating themselves until we begin to identify with them and would miss them badly if we lost them.They have become part of our autobiographical narrative, which we would now, without them, only stagger forward. A favorite teapot or cooking pan can feel like an old friend, reflecting memories of the thoughts and sensations arising from those pots of tea and satisfying meals, the ways we worked with them to produce a perfect brew or pasta sauce. The sight of the pan might recall the sight, sound, and smell of the olive oil sizzling at the edges of the garlic, capturing its flavor before we add the tomatoes and basil. A comfortable chair might seem to have absorbed the dreams from the naps we had sitting there, or images from the movies we watched or books we read. Hundreds of latent images can be sent floating just barely superliminal each time we sit, adding comfort to the air. Many objects will have a story behind them, like the origins of my carpet, but also stories that have grown around how they have claimed a permanent position in our home or traveled with us over time from place to place. Some will accrete meaning primarily through use, even though their stories are humble. And then some might alternatively lose significance, grow boring or even annoying. We might come to resent them, fight with them. Some wear out and have to be replaced, so we disown them. We let them go, and the process begins again with new objects. Our relationships to objects, especially those we bring into our homes, can be complex, even melodramatic (Easthope, 2004). Saito (2007) argues that people create and value a unique aesthetics of ambience, atmosphere, or mood surrounding the experience of everyday (not just exceptional) life.

Homemaking is a lot more than than adopting objects, of course. It is also the process of caring for these things and the spaces we and they occupy, cleaning and preserving, dusting and painting, and making an arrangement that is partly for efficiency, but more importantly, for beauty. This beauty might be only of the “Third Realm” (Danto, 2003, after Hegel)--third place after the “higher” forms of natural and artistic beauty because it is considered merely the adornment of something without inherent beauty, but this ranking is questionable. The homes we make, when we have the chance to do it right, accommodate our lives like a welcoming hand. We ache to leave our jobs at the end of the day to return to the comfort of home. Even after the most exotic and rewarding travels we ache for home. We can relax there, finally, because we have made it our own--it caters to us because we have catered to it. The Talking Heads sang about the modern delight to “pick the building that I want to live in” (Byrne, 1977), a home that can make it “easy to get things done,” to do important, personal things in these personal spaces because they offer convenience, including the chance to “relax with my loved ones.“ The tone is ironic, but the sentiment is not. Within our capabilities, we make our lives beautiful and convenient (not contrary concepts) by adapting our homes to us, by making them an extension of us. This is much more than decorative.

For couples and families, it might be the relationships between companions that make a home, more than the building and objects it contains. Even a small space and a few comforting objects might be enough to constitute a home for a couple, and perhaps it’s better that way--less baggage to weigh down the relationship, to drag focus from what is important. A studio or dilapidated apartment can feel secure and substantial in the right company--even an automobile or well-stocked van can offer the critical elements. This does not mean objects are not important, just that they are more flexible and acquire meaning more easily with additional people involved in the attribution. Henry David Thoreau advocated a simple lifestyle and home to allow room for a developing a relationship with the nature within and without us, and ascetics like Mahatma Ghandi did the same, even more convincingly, to support a spiritual relationship. The 1960’s hippie movement was built on such principles of simplicity as freedom, but the seventies saw a resurgence of the importance of home as a personal castle. (The Talking Heads emerged in the late 70’s.)

Photo by Patrick Parrish

Again, homemaking is a process, at times an aesthetic project, even more than the accumulation of things. The reward of homemaking comes from the making more than the having. Starting with a foreign space, perhaps an empty space, and claiming it through additions and perfections, slowly building a personal refuge that reflects one’s needs for comfort and beauty--this brings a resounding reward. The massive size of do-it-yourself emporiums, and even the size of the market I visited in Iran, are testament to the importance of homemaking. Even with less means or other priorities, homeowners and renters everywhere put in similar effort to produce an attractive home. In fact, little change has occurred during the last century in the average amount of time we spend caring for our homes, including food preparation and kitchen duties, which seems to be about 18-20 hours for single people, and probably double that for families. Level of affluence seems to make that number higher, not smaller, perhaps due to increased space and number of things owned, but also perhaps to the increased value placed on this aesthetic activity. Much of this homemaking improves the healthiness of a home, but health alone does not explain the scope of motivation, certainly not with modern conveniences.The introduction of advanced technologies that bring efficiencies to homemaking has not changed the amount of time devoted. This reinforces the notion that putting things in order and creating a state of cleanliness, as well as adding a personal stamp on our spaces, are some of the primary sources of meaning in our lives. Order brings a feeling of both beauty and security, however tenuous. The importance of this source of meaning is evident in those who have lost their homes, such as those experiencing natural disasters or in zones of human conflict.

The devastation of losing a home and the importance of building a new one are captured in Neumark’s (2013) study, Drawn to Beauty: The Practice of House-Beautification as Homemaking amongst the Forcibly Displaced. This study looks at the trauma of displacement and the often simple, yet critical, incremental steps that refugees make to recover from a loss of home that breaks their on-going autobiographical narrative. She finds that recovery from traumas like the holocaust, other genocides, and displacement due to civil wars requires not assigning blame, retaliation, nor even accepting the trauma, which can lead to strong depression, but moving on and recovering a sense of beauty, a sense of control, often using a very few possessions taken in the haste of evacuation, and “reclaiming power over the experience of displacement” through “practical and symbolic beautification.” It involves making the new environment more familiar through physical adaptations that offer an expression of agency, taking the autobiographical narrative in a newly positive direction--re-attaching oneself to a world in which one is entitled to beauty.

Home may be one of the most primal and critical components of meaning in our lives. The refugee experience studied by Neumark magnifies its importance, but we each experience it everyday. From the time we wake up and step to the floor, feeling the carpet, wood, or tile beneath our feet, to the time we crawl into bed, the aesthetics of our home ambience is at play.

References

Byrne, David (1977), Don’t worry about the government, Talking Heads: 77.
Danto, Author (2003), The abuse of beauty, Peru, Illinois, Open Court.
Hazel Easthope (2010) A place called home, Housing, Theory and Society, 21:3, 128-138, DOI: 10.1080/14036090410021360
Neumark, Devora (2013), Drawn to Beauty: The Practice of House-Beautification as Homemaking amongst the Forcibly Displaced, Housing, Theory and Society, 30:3, 237-261, DOI: 10.1080/14036096.2013.789071
Saito, Yuriko (2007) Everyday Aesthetics, Oxford University Press.

Ten definitions of the Word "Meaning"

Throughout this blog, I have suggested that aesthetic experiences are “those that stand out as especially meaningful.” As if that cleared everything up.

But this is glossing over, shorthand for a wide range of experiences. What makes us call an experience meaningful? What is really happening when we feel this way? This short exploration attempts to answer these questions in at least ten ways. Ten is a lot of ways, and there is naturally some overlap. But I think a case can be made for the individual efficacy of each of these ten definitions, and probably many more. (Acknowledgements to philosopher George Santayana for this riff on his famous essay, “Some Meanings of the Word Is”).*

1. Meaning is definition: When we ask, What does that word mean?, we are asking what the word, as a symbol, signifies. We expect the response to be a synonym, or perhaps one or more phrases that clarify the definition in more detail. Experiences can have definitions as well, but more complex than a synonym can satisfy. A wedding is more than the dictionary definition of that word, its meaning might include a description of the typical rituals involved, the expectations implied and feelings associated with the experience, which also define it.
2. Meaning is importance: We call something meaningful when it is important to us, when it has or will have a large impact. A turning point in our lives is meaningful. An historic event is meaningful when it has repercussions. A statistic is meaningful when it provides clear evidence. Even a small object or event can be meaningful when it reminds us of something else significant to us—a family member, another part of our life.
3. Meaning indicates value: Similar to importance, value indicates importance, in this case in terms of our willingness to devote time or money--a more personal significance. We volunteer time for a cause because it is meaningful to us. We read about a topic, such as its history or deep explanatory texts, because it holds meaning. We spend time and money on family activities because we value those connections. Travel or sports might be meaningful for the rewards they bring, so we invest in the equipment and means to engage in them.
4. Meaning denotes relationship: The relationship of one thing to others is a part of its definition. This is particularly true for people, who define themselves by their relationships to family, profession, class, nationality, race, and of course, favorite football teams. Sometimes common tastes define a group, particularly musical tastes or favorite hobbies. Shared meaningful beliefs also create relationships. Things and events are meaningful when they help to define our relationship to society or the natural world.
5. Meaning emerges from order: We discern meaning when things are in order--well sorted, visible, and in their proper place. A text is meaningful not just by being accurate, but also by being well organized. A well-structured event is easier to engage in, we can find our way within it and know where it will take us. We know where and how to fit inside meaningful experiences and how to play a role.
6. Meaning is clarity: Order helps to provide clarity, but a clear explanation does even more to make something meaningful. When all the words work together to elucidate, when the image is discernible, when the music reaches an expected destination or engaging rhythm, these bring clarity. An experience has clarity when all the elements have a recognizable place, when the elements are expressive of a clear purpose.
7. Meaning is continuity: As much as some of us hate boredom, we hate discontinuity more. We are creatures of habit, we like to know what comes next. What a nightmare it would be to wake up in an unknown place with an unknown identity, with nothing to hang onto, needing to decide on a first step, not just a next one. We want recognizable buoy. Experiences are most meaningful when they build on our past and intended future.
8. Meaning is truth: Truth is another of those multifaceted words that demand a lot of care. Experiences are meaningful if they feel true. But if you expect objective truth, you want more than a feeling, you want the experience to be rationally solid, beyond argument, and based on evidence, with confidence that the meaning you derive will be derivable in all equal situations for all those who experience with equal rationality. Art does not have much place here. If you allow for pragmatic truth, or warranted assertions, meaning emerges when it suits your needs and purposes, and also that of others. Pragmatic truth can be agreed upon based on common experiences, whether or not it was rationally derived. It might simply “ring true,” and that might be good enough. For many, art is expected to possess at least pragmatic truth. Finally, you might be moved more by an inner, intuitive truth, non-rational, not-necessarily-pragmatic, but powerful to you and others who might be open to your expression of it. Some prefer art that is only intuitively true, open to many personal interpretations of meaning.
9. Meaning is intention: We all have intentions, goals, wishes, hopes, and beliefs—states of mind that color which experiences emerge as most meaningful. If an experience leads us toward or supports an intention, it engages us and makes it stand out as meaningful. If you want to climb your first 4000 meter mountain and finally do it, this milestone stands out above other major hikes (which are already aesthetic) because it satisfies your intention. If an experience confirms a belief about yourself or your world, it stands out. If an experience “sets things right,” confirms or justifies a situation—leads to an outcome that seems justified, we might call it meaningful.
10. Meaning is identity: Identity is another way of saying “definition”, so we have come full circle. But here the word indicates perhaps the most important meaning of all—our personally felt identity. Identity is composed of those things we find significant, our values, our relationships, and our beliefs and intentions, so it heavily overlaps the other definitions. When an experience feels deeply personal, engages our agency to help define us and our role in the world, it contributes to building our identity. There is no experience more meaningful. First and foremost, aesthetic experiences are immediate and personal.

If this does not exactly exhaust the exploration, it surely suggests how multifaceted meaning can be, and how pervasive aesthetic experiences might be. Aesthetic experiences might feel meaningful in any of these ways, and likely in more than one of these ways. Our experience of meaning is what makes art and everyday life powerful, more so when some effort is demanded to discern that meaning. When we have to work at it, it is all the more appreciated.

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* Made infamous by US President Bill Clinton in his response to accusations of his infidelity, on the nature of his relationship to the young intern-- “It depends upon what the meaning of the word IS is.” 

Travel, and 3 Problematic Metaphors

It has been said that all the plots of all the stories in the world can be distilled into two general themes: (1) a stranger comes to town, and (2) someone, the hero, goes on a journey. All stories worth telling can be seen as being about how we confront change or new situations, whether these come to us unexpectedly or we find or seek them out by purposefully leaving our comfort zone.

This essay on everyday aesthetics is about the second case, going on a journey, or traveling. However, travel offers a window onto the world that, in the right lighting, when the scene behind it becomes obscure--when the strange becomes virtually unknowable, as it can during travel--also becomes a mirror, such that even these two general themes become blurred. Who is the hero? Who is the stranger?

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Travel can be profound. Unlike some of the topics discussed in this blog on everyday aesthetics, Cooking and Eating, for example, travel is not really something we can or want to do everyday. However, it is highly aesthetic, as I will try to show, even though it is not typically considered in the same company as Art. But travel and Art serve the same purposes--providing meaning, making life special, and more deeply appreciating and participating in life.

Three common reasons offered for why we travel are to “lose oneself,” to “find oneself,” and to “see the world.” We will start with these metaphors, then explore how travel encompasses all of these and more, sharing the same purposes as Art, creating an aesthetic experience.

1
Some say we travel to “lose ourselves.” And indeed travel--or tourism if we want to make that distinction--is often marketed as an escape from the monotony or burnout related to the daily routines that have built up around us. Images of inclined, swimsuited, happy people on the beach, relaxing with eyes closed or shaded by sunglasses, sipping cocktails in the open air under clear skies, or strolling aimlessly and slowly through a wilderness or historic city, suggest a comforting sort of nothingness as the blessed alternative to overwhelming obligations. In reality, true burnout requires a cure that is the opposite of nothingness. And travel can be one of those cures when the space it opens is filled with an engaging new somethingness, whether relaxing or exhilarating.

Photo by Patrick Parrish

But “losing oneself” is a misleading metaphor. Whatever we lose, we still follow our enigmatic selves into even the most novel situations (much to our gain). Truly losing even a part of oneself requires significant effort, which is just what some try to avoid when they travel. The travel we often engage in might might help us temporarily lose habits, obligations, and relentlessly familiarity, and this is a good thing--unless they are simply replaced by new habits that are equally limiting or even more debilitating.

On the other hand, this is not to say that there is no power in boredom, which rather than being frustrating might just create enough hunger for stimulation that it results in creativity. The effort to temporarily reject habits and remain open-minded to new options–this can release creative energy that is otherwise blocked by preoccupation. It might also release playful energy that has been submerged under the weight of obligations. Clearly, both of these are healthy outcomes, but travel can do more as well.

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Others might say we travel to “find ourselves,” another good but misleading metaphor. These two reasons sound like opposites, and “finding” looks like the proactive and productive one, while the former seems only passive. But they can also be flip sides of the same experience. Losing your current rendition of self creates the opportunity to find other possibilities.

Truly losing oneself requires a great deal of confidence, a willingness to accept and live with uncertainty, and trust that a new self can be found. It also requires a lot of work, both to give up the status quo and to build a new front to face the world, work that few are willing to undertake. Moving to live and work in a new, distant place is especially hard. There is no return ticket ready to take you back to the familiar routine.

“Finding oneself” can mean a lot of things, including adopting new goals, recognizing new strengths and capabilities, finding new perspectives on life and one’s role in it, or discovering a place (geographical or social) where one feels “at home,” where one can fit in, be understood, and apply one’s strengths. Contrary to a surface reading of this metaphor, finding oneself also involves seeing the people around us in new ways, because much of the self is revealed only in the reflections of others. Travel offers the perfect opportunity for all such changes.

Photo by Maja Kuna-Parrish

Travel is about more than changing our physical environment, although this creates significant impacts in itself. The shift from an urban environment to a wilderness, for example, might create a form of eco-shock if you are not used to it. Being close to trees and water and rocks, and mud and brambles and bugs, or larger and even potentially dangerous wild animals--these can call for new internal resources that force us to respond with new resilience, new selves.

However, those not accustomed to distant travels, where cultural differences are obvious, might not be attuned to the possibility that even short travels are also cultural excursions in which we find people who do things differently from us--and get along just fine doing them that way. Whether across town, or across continents, travel can reveal the breadth of possibilities of human experience. With an open mind, the traveler might begin to question her assumptions. Paul Bowles (1949), in his novel, The Sheltering Sky, offered the distinction that while a tourist “accepts his own civilization without question,” an open-minded traveler “compares it with the others and rejects those elements he finds not to his liking.” In other words, a traveler is open to change, open even to a new self, while a tourist might find cultural differences simply another one of the attractions or a necessary bother worth the suntan. There is a scene in Frank Capra’s film, “It’s a Wonderful Life,” where the young protagonist is planning to leave his small hometown to see the world, and has visited a local luggage shop. He asks for the largest trunk available, holding up his hands to indicate a size equal to his own height and width, assuming the size of the suitcase is proportional to the distance one plans to travel. This is, of course, quite the opposite of those who advocate a “vagabonding” approach to travel, where we leave as much of ourselves behind as possible, making our burden light and leaving space for the new things we are sure to find (for example, see Potts, 2002).

The spirit of travel versus tourism requires “crossing a border,” a significance highlighted by Ryszard Kapusinski (2004/2008) in his illuminating memoir, “Travels with Herodotus.” In his case this was the rarely penetrated border of soviet-ruled Poland, which he crossed more than once as a journalist to find India, Africa, and many other distant lands unreachable by most of his readers. That border, for him and for most of us, is to a great deal also the selves we have erected. “Finding oneself” can happen when crossing a cultural border because this transgression shatters barriers that might bind and blind us.

As someone travels, many parts of selves become available to try on--new ways of speaking, new attitudes, new graciousness, new tolerances, new skills and knowledge. The parts can be taken on incrementally, in a crash course, or not at all, depending on your needs and desires. But you don’t have to lose oneself entirely to find something new and useful. These part-selves can arise from the simplest elements in the new places we explore, both natural and human elements.

When we travel we often allow ourselves to explore the small details of a place, the ones we tend to overlook in daily routines. We might become like children, following the ones that “make the familiar strange,” like when we see something under a microscope for the first time. Following small leads to new experiences, which we have more time and opportunity to do when we travel, can lead to revelations. We might see them only out of the corner of our eye, have them rush past us as we move along like things glanced out the window of a train or moving car. Or they might come smashing us head on, like not knowing how to react in a critical situation such as a major disruption to our plans or difficulty addressing a basic need. The details might accumulate. We might not even recognize the evolving changes in ourselves, like a slow infection. Then one day, we realize we are new.

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Another popular metaphor for why we travel is to “see the world,” to look beyond the limits of oneself. As you might already have guessed, this metaphor is linked to both “losing” and “finding oneself,” because seeing the world is not just seeing new things, but being prepared to see them with new eyes. We all already have a world to see. From our infancy, from the day we are aware, we are already “in the world,” as phenomenologists like Heidegger would put it, partly because we are unavoidably immersed in our social and physical context that so heavily influences how we choose to be (even when we choose to withdrawal from it). Moreover, our consciousness is not really as much self-consciousness, as we are led to believe, as consciousness of the world around us. As phenomenologists might put it, we are aware because we are in the world, and even more so, because we are part of it.

Photo by Patrick Parrish

Yet, as the song goes, “there’s such a lot world to see.” There are all the famous sites we have read about and seen in photos, there are all the peoples we have glimpsed in films and heard speaking in strange tongues. There are the mountains, the rivers, the buildings, the landscapes, the seas, the national parks, the UNESCO World Heritage Sites. Few do not want to have the experiences of visiting these. For some, it is a matter of collecting them, like books on a shelf. Other people feel incomplete without them. For them, NOT traveling is like living inside a fenced pasture. They need to jump the fence, cross the border, or they know they will be missing out on the wealth of experience available. And it is not just a matter of seeing things, it is feeling and being new things. Finding new sensations, new selves.

These travel-oriented people may also realize just how finite their lives are, and how special moments can be. As Paul Bowles (1949) put it: “How many more times will you remember a certain afternoon of your childhood, some afternoon that's so deeply a part of your being that you can't even conceive of your life without it? Perhaps four or five times more. Perhaps not even that. How many more times will you watch the full moon rise? Perhaps twenty. And yet it all seems limitless.” Travel can be a way of refilling the container, extending the finite, and edging toward the limitless.

As the other metaphors imply, travel is also an inward journey. An acid “trip” came to be called that for the journey it can entail. Some disparage travel as a distraction from the most important journeys one can take, the internal ones. As the underrated Beatles song by George Harrison goes (“The Inner Light,” B-side to the more famous Lady Madonna single):

“Without going out of my door
I can know all things of Earth.
Without looking out of my window
I could know the ways of heaven.
The farther one travels
The less one knows”

There’s no place like home. It is not that we do not already have a rich and wonderful world, but that others are also available if we have the urge to look for them.

This talk of losing and finding and seeing the world leads to questions about the substance of a self and a life. Whether a self is defined with the physical boundaries of the skin or the experiential boundaries of a consistent point of view, and whether a life is defined as the sequence of events of an individual self or a process of an evolving interchange between the world and that self, losing oneself is a nonsense proposition. What we really mean when we say we want to lose ourselves is that we want to change how we converse with the world. We want to learn. We want to be enlightened.

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In the end, as useful as the metaphors are, the attraction of travel is better explained in its qualities of aesthetic experience. It often follows the quintessential pattern of artful activity, with a slight twist in that the need, desire, or puzzlement that propels it is often only vaguely defined. In this sense, the conclusion is also open to opportunity--to varying degrees depending on the open-mindedness of the person. We choose to travel based on our trust that all the qualities of an aesthetic experience can be checked off:

• A perceived need or desire: in this case, a desire to explore new things or need to escape from mundane habits, not necessarily a search for specific answers or resolutions. The choice to travel may simply reflect a desire for evidence that raises new questions and mysteries to explore that might force our minds to expand beyond their current narrowness.
• Compelling anticipation: What lies beyond the next corner, the next airport, the next train station, the next mountain pass? What will we find that challenges or rewards our expectations?
• Deep engagement: in the newness of the places visited, historical or natural wonders, challenges faced, people encountered. We need to pay attention or risk losing our way or missing an opportunity.
• Immediate experience: not an experience that comes from media like a TV, computer, tablet, or phone, but directly. A focus on the now, not our past or future, magnified by the influx of sensual details that come with being someplace new.
• A conclusion: a return to a status quo that is somehow no longer the same, a return that can bring the comfort of a rounding out rather than renewed boredom, a return with new eyes, which enhances life by closing a story worth remembering and telling, and, potentially, bringing an internal change that changes everything.

You might notice that all the metaphors for reasons to travel have a place in this pattern of experience. “Losing oneself” is a positive desire when it means opening up to new things or the determination to forget negative experience. Losing oneself, in the form of losing self-consciousness and preoccupation, is also required for deep engagement and immediate experience, for becoming absorbed in the details. “Finding oneself” is a noble goal, a desire that leads to compelling anticipation that new answers and new learning awaits. “Seeing the world” is the opened eye and expanded engagement that arises from anticipation and from attention to the immediate things in the aesthetic experience. Seeing the world means seeing the now that is always there, but frequently lost. It also, of course, means seeing new things that were not available before, but have potential for new impacts—what we came for. It means the power of forgetting and learning how to see in new ways.

What is added to the metaphors is a holistic context, from impulse to resolution. The return is just as important as the journey out, as described in Joseph Cambell’s theories of the power of myth. The return is reaping the reward of the experience. Losing, finding, and seeing combined, and finally taking what we find back to carry on with new energy and insight--this is the powerful thing about travel.

If there is no return but instead a decision to stay, it is no longer travel. It becomes something else, emigration perhaps, or escape, and the metamorphosis is even greater.

(A very nice summary of the metaphors discussed here and more can be found in the essay, Why we travel, by Pico Iyer. Iyer travels the same path, notices different things, and finds different but compatible conclusions.)

Take a walk

Even our first, unspectacular steps are a wondrous experience. Typically, a parent or parents are urging and cheering us on as we make our first journey on two feet, so it can be a social event of high order. And even though we quickly end up grounded again, the arc of the struggled rise to our feet and tenuous traversing even a small distance before falling back to the safety of the horizontal, one of the early dramatic arcs of our lives, gives us a sense of power, with all manner of things beginning to come within reach. The vision of the longer journeys ahead, offering escape from our safe but small worlds, keep us trying until our skills are up to the task.

Photo by karen ybanez

It is difficult to imagine the number of walks I have taken. Perhaps assuming it is slightly less than the number of days I have lived since I was about 1 or 2 years-old is a good starting point. Subtracting for some days of too much desk work, horrendous weather or illness in bed keeps the number realistic, although on many days I there were more than one. By using the term, “a walk,” I am referring to those experiences in which walking itself was a primary motivation or the central activity. This includes not only walks or hikes just for the joy of walking—the sights they enable, the physical exercise, the contemplative state of mind they engender—which we will come back to, but also those with a targeted destination, like school, work, the library or museum, a restaurant or movie theater, where walking may have been either an optional or mandatory mode of travel, but became an event of its own.

For example, I recall my walks to and from school from 1st to 9th grade as distinct events, not just necessary transitions. These short journeys, for a time as much as two kilometers one-way, often in challenging weather, included some momentous mind-wanderings as well. Whether through introspection or conversations with friends, my habits of thought and disposition of character grew during these walks. Because they were repeated so many times, I can almost envision, no, experience them still, with their still-vivid milestones, including the green parks, painted homes larger than my own, and busy streets creating a familiar daily pattern not unlike a favorite song one can listen to every day. These walks were an important part of the texture and rhythm of those days, as well as sources of inspiration.

Photo by hc_hillary

Touring an unfamiliar city on foot is another type of targeted walk--destination or no destination in mind. Becoming acquainted with a place from the ground up, the unevenness or smoothness of its surfaces, the labyrinthine nature or predictability of its paths and street crossings, the encounters with its buildings and artworks, the natives who walk by us with other things on their minds, with purposeful speed or bedraggled slowness. Walking allows us to use all our senses to expand the experience of the tour—the sounds and smells in the air and textures beneath our feet are as much a part of the “there” of a place as the visible structures, paths, and plants. Most will agree that walking a place is the only real way to get to know it.

We typically place limits on what qualifies as a walk. Distance is relative to our speed, which depends on our level of health and abilities, but since time is more directly correlated with effort, it makes the most fitting measure. And like the temporal distortion described in Einstein’s Theory of General Relativity, the increased experience of gravity we struggle against when climbing a steep hill makes time expand. Walking in a city like Lisbon or on a mountain trail might make shorter walks satisfying. But there are minimums.

Photo by Patrick Parrish

Five minutes is not “a walk,” and 15 minutes does not qualify for most of us. It takes at least twenty minutes to make a walk. This is the average time a person needs to walk a mile, but physical distance is not as important as mental distance. Not coincidentally, twenty minutes is also the recommended time for a session of transcendental meditation, the time it takes to calm the mind and receive the benefits. Many might prefer much longer walks—even hours, to make the experience more impactful—but twenty minutes is enough to allow a walk to come into its own. In this time, the mind can go through a transition from the ongoing noise of internal deliberations, mental replaying of annoyances and outrages, and worries of upcoming demands, and shift to more free-flowing, creative thoughts. It is enough time, with practice, to lose oneself in the moment—where the mind is free to play without the constant claim for our attention from the past and future. The arc of rising to one’s feet, traveling, and then coming to rest again becomes also the luminous, electrical arc of creative connection.

Photo by Edison Tech Center

This is not to discount the physicality of walking. The rhythm of two legs propelling us forward, two arms swinging to keep the balance and provide further momentum. For such a simple activity, walking is invigorating, and can be a critical part of any healthy life. The choice to take regular walks has been shown to be a marker of good health, especially for older people. Unlike other forms of exercise, walking requires no equipment other than comfortable shoes and clothing to suit the weather, no special skills other than a bit of endurance, and no special location in which it needs to be conducted, other than a safe footpath. Even many of those with mobility limitations can engage in a form of walking.

Photo by Patrick Parrish

Despite the long tradition of dualistic thinking, the mind and body are not easily separated, and taking a walk, like all physical activity, engages the whole person. This proposition is more than a philosophical one—medical research also widely recognizes the mind/body connection. Nonetheless, dualism is especially common in applications of aesthetics, which are typically reserved for objects of beauty or stories and melodies. But a close analysis of the attention to form, ritual and the deep engagement people feel when participating in, or even just watching sports and other physical practices like martial arts and yoga throws this assumption out the window. In fact, it is precisely the rhythmic physicality of walking that makes it so compelling and conducive to thought.

Short walks, let’s say 20 minutes to one hour, can be fit into about any day, and can be one of the most important parts of it. A change of scenery, whether to the street or park, is liberating, but even an indoor treadmill brings rewards. Not unlike swinging or rocking, the rhythm of a walk alters our perspective, puts us more inside our body, but also inside the outside world. No longer static, the world moves by us and through us--it becomes animated through our movement. We take it less for granted. We might find new nuances in its objects, perhaps, as Charles Baxter puts it, even handing over our “feeling and thinking to the objects that constitute (our) environment,” attributing sentience or even wisdom to the world’s objects. Perhaps it is the trees and grass or stones that have something to say about existence that we have not been privy to lately. At the same time this worldly connection occurs, the mental focus on our inner world blurs, and we might become more creative or open to new trains of thought. Solutions might appear to us that would otherwise stay hidden, and new perspectives on a situation are almost certain. These changes usually emerge in a predictable pattern-- the period of slow disengagement, a renewing emptiness, and then the glow or brilliant arc of the unpremeditated. But an epiphany is not necessary for a walk to be worthwhile. A subtle change of mood is sufficient.

Photo by Giuseppe Milo

Some feel that twenty minutes is barely scratching the surface, and are only satisfied with a hike. While hikes were a necessity of life in the past for most people, to conduct commerce or for gathering food, water or other critical goods, hikes are these days performed by people determined to escape their too-sedentary lives in urban or suburban areas. Hikes can enhance the common qualities of walks, but also allow other dimensions to emerge. Hikes are set off more clearly as aesthetic experiences.

Several qualities come together to achieve this. First, hikes are usually associated with walks in wilderness areas. Where nature is more raw, unadulterated, we are more likely to find beauty and what we are willing to accept as truths. Nineteenth century Romantic period literature and painting dramatized this, attributing to the wilderness an equivalence to our underlying emotional potential and granting its superiority over human powers. Research has shown that experiencing the outdoors, even in small-scale parks, has very positive physical, mental, and emotional impacts. On the large scale, like wilderness areas, this effect is perhaps magnified. Panoramas of natural environments are almost universally loved, but even the details in a wilderness, unusual to those of us living most of our time in urban habitats, draw our appreciation—a mushroom patch, colorful lichen, wild animals, a rushing stream, towering or thick stands of trees, the expanse of fallen leaves in autumn, and the wider expanse of green leaves in summer.

Photo by Patrick Parrish

The length of hikes and their typical elevation gain make them more physically challenging, raising our heart rate and creating the pleasurable burning sensation in our muscles. Our body is telling us we are achieving something, that we are building stamina to bring to all aspects of our lives. Hikes are usually more destination-oriented than “walks.” Like other aesthetic experiences, we set a challenge to reach a place with a rewarding sight, such as a panorama, waterfall, or other landmark, or we aim to traverse a variety of ecosystems for the cumulative effect these differences have on us. This challenge compels us, offers resistances to overcome, and finally brings physical and emotional rewards when met.

The things that make good Art are also the things that make a good walk. The opportunity for new sights, sounds, and sensations beyond our mundane experience. The ability to make us think in new ways or perceive things differently, including our own bodies. The chance to change ourselves a little, enabling new conclusions, ideas and emotions, as well as physical improvements. And the potential for a good story, or at least a dramatic arc of departure and return.

Taking Photos

Each second, over 41,000 photographs are taken. Based on recent trends, it is estimated that worldwide the number of non-professional photos alone that will be taken in 2017 is 1.3 trillion. Nearly 80% of these can be attributed to the rapidly growing use of smartphones, which make cameras available to most people all day, everyday. The number of photos taken has tripled each year since 2010 from a mere 80 billion. This growth is enabled by technology, but not driven by it. It is driven by the human desire to make experience aesthetic, for which taking photos is a particularly common avenue.

Photo by Patrick Parrish

Long before digital photography made such growth possible, the sound of the mechanical camera shutter had become one of the distinctive sounds of the 20th century. Already by 1930, 1 billion photos were taken each year, and number of shutter clicks continued to grow exponentially. However, this click/sliding noise of the moving mirror still fills our soundscapes because digital cameras reproduce it artificially, as a comforting reminder of cameras past and, more practically, as assurance that we did indeed take a photo.

Photography as Art

Few question any longer whether photography is an art form, but when it was a young medium, like film, it was considered simply a means of mechanical reproduction of what we see, and not equal to painting the same scene, for example. During the second half of the 19th century, its primary purpose was documentation, portraits of people, places, and events, such as the famous battlefield photos of the American Civil War, or Edward Muybridge’s photosequence studies of people and animals in motion. In fact, the artistic uses of photography remain secondary to this day.

Eadweard Muybridge, 1872, Public Domain

That photographs could also be Art was recognized only over time. But by the first decade of the 20th century, one could find both many more consciously artistic documentation photos and photos that were created purely as Art. One early photo of a young woman dying of turbuculosis with her worried family, is a famous example that shows early realization of photography’s dramatic potential. Due to the limits of the technology at the time, the photo is made of multiple exposures carefully planned and artfully arranged.

Henry Peach Robinson (1958), Public Domain

Arguments persisted that photography was a lesser art because it WAS mechanical reproduction after all, and was soon widely open to amateur use, but any serious reflection saw that image choice, composition, image settings, and manipulation during processing could turn it into “high” art (we can use “Art” with the capital “A”) as much as any other medium. But the dominant use has always been taking photos that are meant to just document what we see. We might make a distinction between “making photos” (using the tools available for artistic manipulation) and “taking photos” (what we do quickly in our everyday use). However, the premise of this article is that even everyday photos are taken with an aesthetic intent (although some, like Sontag, 1977, wrongly belittle this intent, comparing most everyday photography to “aesthetic consumerism”).

Like so many other forms of everyday aesthetics, the line between taking everyday photos and artistic activity is blurred, perhaps even unnecessary. Nonetheless, this post is focused on the aesthetic aspects of everyday photography done without the primary intent to make Art.

Photography as Life

Then why will non-professionals take 1.3 trillion photos this year? While we are all concerned to some degree with how everyday photos look, and while many of the millions of photos shared each day on social networking sites can be quite artistic, for most people how the photos that they share look is usually less important than what they show, and that they show something meaningful about us.

Everyday life is made meaningful, lifted above the ordinary, when we delineate it somehow, give it borders or shape, or stamp it in a personal, effortful way. It can slip between our grasp unless some effort is made to mark it in this way, or to dramatize its events and our experiences of them. All the ways mentioned in this blog, including preparing food, decorating homes, gardening, collecting, storytelling, sports, mental achievements, and many others, function to set off experience as aesthetic. Taking photos is yet another way to give shape, dramatize, and set off our experience for aesthetic appreciation. Capturing a scene within the boundaries of a photo immediately creates an object of appreciation above the blur of the ongoing events that pass in front of our eyes. We might take a photo to preserve a moment to share with others, whether the moment denotes a major accomplishment, a milestone, or just that we are alive here and now. This is what millions, or billions rather, do via social media sites. We might otherwise preserve the photo primarily for ourselves, so that we can recall what we and those around us were like on this day, to be appreciated on another day in the future. Photographic preservation can provide a sense of control over time and intransigent nature. On the contrary, some suggest that it can kill the vibrancy of the moment by calling out the fact that change and eventual decay make the captured moment already a dead one (which is also a valid aesthetic response if you think about it), Sontag (1977). This rather negative view, while potentially in the background, does not often come to mind. But taking a photo can steal our attention from an experience, in effect deadening it, if we are overzealous with our cameras instead of our naked eyes.

On holiday travels in popular destinations, the most common sight is not a monument or beautiful scene, but one person being photographed by another.

Photo by Patrick Parrish

Travels are a time to step away from everyday life, an aesthetic experience in themselves, but also a perfect opportunity to have our images preserved during a heightened moment, a time when we might feel we are at our best. Travel photos of people are often taken at famous sites, but are just as often taken at any representative location that says we are somewhere else than in our normal location, because the important subject is the person, not the place. Depending on the person, posing for such shots is either a dilemma or a delight. Some are happy to shout their presence with a glamour pose or with arms raised in real or pretend joy. Others remain uncomfortable, struggling to achieve an awkward smile, hoping the image will not look unnatural, but knowing it will anyway, because posing is always posing.

Richard Shusterman (2012) explores the interplay between the photographer and subject during a professional photo session, comparing it to theatrical performance. He mentions the complex interpersonal exchange needed to achieve the artistic goals of the portrait, whether mutual or owned only by the artist. The subject needs to feel comfortable enough to let themselves be seen for who they are, and the photographer needs to negotiate to expose who the subject really is, or who she wants him to be.

This performance aspect of taking a photo exists also in any non-professional photo portrait, even if it is less intentional or impactful. Each portrait, even the one almost lost within the crowd marveling a historical location, is a micro-drama outside the normal flow of events during those moments that lead up to the shutter snap, and both the photographers and persons being photographed usually enjoy this artifice. The act of taking the photo might even become one of those moments of feeling fully alive, even if it is a balance of pretense and genuine emotion.

Photo by Patrick Parrish

Of course we also take photos of the places and things we visit, not just people in front of them, but similarly, it is our being there and the act of taking the photo that is often the most important subject. An uncountable number of photos are taken each year at places like Ayer’s Rock, the Eiffel Tower, the Grand Canyon, and the Disneyland’s Sleeping Beauty’s Castle. No one really needs to document these sites yet again, but they do need to document that they were there, and maybe to attempt a photo with that personal touch that demonstrates it. Perhaps a thousand photos each day are taken of the Da Vinci’s Mona Lisa hanging in the Louvre. None of these photos lives up to the painting, and most are not even worth looking at, taken along with the accompanying tops of heads of complete strangers who were lucky enough to get closer. But the photo is still special because it is proof that we were there.

Photo by Patrick Parrish

Other than travels, milestones and special events are another favorite time for taking photos. Weddings, graduations, birthdays, group lunches and dinners, and parties of any kind are mandatory times for photos. It is almost as if the event did not happen unless there is at least one photo taken. These photos are certainly about the people in them, but also about the event and the implied time that precedes and follows it, and photos are even one of the things that makes the event special. A wedding without a photo is almost unthinkable. In many weddings, the photographer is one of the most prominent people after the bride and groom.

Special events come in all sizes, and even a new haircut, a well prepared meal, a new dress, or a rainbow, sunset, or moonrise might demand a photo to mark the occasion.

Photography as Artful Life

With the explosion of smartphone ownership, we now have cameras at our fingertips to document not just special moments, but everyday observations that interest us. Before smartphones, the effort to find a ready camera might leave many rainbows uncaptured, but no longer. Today, the creative eye might capture special images each day--an interesting play of light, a subtle pattern or geometric arrangement of objects, a dramatic closeup, an interesting tableaux, or something seen frequently but this time in a new way, maybe due to how it is framed, angled, juxtaposed, or zoomed in or out. A daily walk, the commute to work, or the evening’s closing minutes on the balcony can all provide photo opportunities. Anything can be the source of a moment of beauty worth capturing in a photo.

Barcelona, Spain, Photo by Maja Kuna

While most everyday photos are intended to document something, some do more. Representation, which is one of the most traditional roles of Art, is the the role that Socrates railed against, feeling that art as an imitation of life hid the truth from us. Had the technology been around, I suspect Socrates would have hated photos of all kinds. But photos, both everyday and artistic ones, can also be used to create a new experience, and not just a representation. Photos necessarily borrow from the visual materials of life, but they can also transcend it, and the result might be like nothing at all in our daily experience, nothing like what the naked eye usually senses, at least consciously. Photos allow us to manufacture something personal, mystical, or just indefinable, which can be another one of photography’s aesthetic rewards--a means to the creation of new meanings.

Bytom Musuem, Poland, Photo by Maja Kuna

Representation is not a dead end, but it is a limited one. It impossible to capture experience itself. We might want to hold onto the feeling, the flow of thoughts, the evolution of sensations over time, the entire field of view along with its sounds and smells and textures and our internal responses to them. But we can never catch it all. Even the best works of literature and films, with their richer source material, struggle to do this. What we capture in photos, when we are lucky, is always a synecdoche of the experience, a piece that we accept to remind us of the whole. When we find that small piece that is powerful enough to suggest the total experience, this is when we approach the realm of Art. But it happens everyday too, in those lucky moments when we are especially attuned. When a photo might just be enough.

Taking photos reflects a fundamental drive, an everyday aesthetic activity with the goal to make life special, to give it meaning, and to help us connect to others, the world and the transient moments that comprise a life.

References

Newhall, B.  (1964) The history of photography. New York: The Museum of Modern Art.
Shusterman, R. (2012) Thinking through the body: Essays in somaesthetics. Cambridge, NY: Cambridge University Press.
Sontag, S. (1977), On Photography. New York: Picador.