Romanian-born photographer Dan St. Andrei adopts a philosophical approach to the art of photography. He states: “Life is eventually an eternal attempt to understand your purpose, to build up and mold, to grow and to define yourself … I would like to discover daily reasons to love myself.” His images take on so many different styles and approaches: from the fetishism of his sensual fragments; to the poetic dynamism of his photographs of dancers; to the reflexive and dream-like quality of his dystopic utopia images, which he calls, in a deliberate pun, Mytopia.
If his photo series have any common thread, it’s in depicting life, as Dan St. Andrei himself puts it, as “beautifully imperfect.” The beauty lies in the aesthetic impact, since Dan St. Andrei’s images are not only beautiful but also dreamy, even haunting. The imperfection is revealed in the human emotions and anxieties they reflect, holding a mirror to both what we reveal and what we hide within. As the artist puts it, through the art of photography, he searches “for the meanings and hidden motivations that put our world into motion.”
It’s difficult to imagine a world without fantasy, without dream. This would be a world devoid of possibilities, without a future. Dan St. Andrei captures our dreams and hopes in motion, as they develop, both literally from the camera as well as figuratively in our minds. He states: “There are moments when we ask ourselves about our purpose in life, about its meaning and our motivations. There are moments when we ask questions about life, as it is or as we imagine it to be.” The gap between reality and dream is not unbridgeable. It’s often connected, in fact, by art and our imaginations: “There are moments when we allow our imaginations to roam free; in which we allow ourselves to dream.”
Dan St. Andrei captures the dreamer in each of us, whether we’re artists or not. After all, it’s our dreams that make more bearable our imperfect reality; that help us change it for the better; that give us hope and a sense of drive and direction in life. Without these aesthetic dreams, we risk getting bogged down in the routines and responsibilities of daily life. The dreamer in us, the artist explains, “lives through these moments” when life’s “imperfection becomes beautiful.” This may be only our personal vision–a fantasy–or what, if we follow our dreams, we make happen in real life.
There is also a sense of nostalgia in Dan St. Andrei’s images, as he suggests bygone eras. He does this without melancholia however, even adding a ludic touch, as in the fashion series below, photographed by Dan St. Andrei and created with the help of the talented stylist, Alin Galatescu.
Andrei Octav Doicescu aptly stated: ”The present disintegrates, first in history, then in nostalgia.” Nostalgia is an acute, often painful, awareness of an irretrievably lost past that we still long for in the present. But Dan St. Andrei shows us the past doesn’t have to evoke sadness. The past can reappear in our present as a playful celebration of previous epochs, in our imaginations, in art and of course in history.
Like a Proustian search for lost time in pictorial form–a search for lost love, for impossibly perfect social structures, for the (unattainable) fulfillment of our sensual and sexual desires–Dan St. Andrei’s photography captures the peregrinations of our search for meaning in a life deprived of certainties. You can view his portfolio on his website, http://danandrei.com/.
Philippe Pache was born in 1961 in Lausanne, Switzerland. He was educated at the School of Applied Arts of Vevey. Since 1982 he has held solo and group exhibits in galleries and museums all over the world, including the Houston Museum of Fine Arts, the Tokyo Metropolitan Museum of Photography, the Bibliothèque Nationale de Paris and the Taiwan Museum of Fine Arts.
For centuries soft shadows in painting expressed mood, emotion and intimacy at least as much as color can. Da Vinci used chiaroscuro to convey the ambiguity of human expression; Caravaggio to highlight the drama and tumult of life; Vermeer to hint at blooming youth and the inner world of thoughts and emotions; La Tour to suggest simple faith and pensiveness.
The Swiss photographer Philippe Pache (http://www.philippepache.com/) relies upon this time-tested technique in painting to bring life, drama and, above all, reverie and contemplation to artistic photography. His nudes exude beauty and tranquility. They are exquisitely posed yet look completely natural. The focus of his images is on how each gesture and expression—the body itself—reveals a rich inner world of thoughts and feelings. The interplay of light and shadow not only highlights the depth of human subjectivity, but also marks the fluid boundaries between humanity and nature. Some of his portraits, though always beautiful, are facial landscapes of light, contour and shadow.
They gleam with the insentience of the mountains, sea and land that sometimes surround them; they become one, interchangeable with their magnificent natural settings. The beauty of femininity captured by Pache goes beyond realistic visual representation. It is the landscape of haunting and delicate dreams. Sometimes, as in the photograph called Cecilia, below, there’s no clear distinction between dreamer and dream. The beautiful young woman, bathed in fiery reds, sleeps peacefully as she, herself, is depicted as a figment of our imaginations, as a dream. Recognizably beautiful yet also indistinct, she floats above the dark shadows and red sheets that envelop her like a vapor.
Dreams are often vague and fragmentary. When we wake up, we rarely remember the whole “picture”: just those frames that broke through the veil of sleep and rose to the surface of our consciousness. Since we often dream about our deepest fears or most poignant desires, the fragmentary, partial nature of our dreams is perhaps nature’s way to protect us from ourselves: from what we either pursue or try to escape most in life. In Joined Hands, the photograph below, Pache once again captures both dreamer and dream. This image reveals an angelic young woman dressed in white, with her hands joined in quiet resignation or fervid prayer: we’ll never know which, since in Pache’s postromantic reveries, the dreamer remains as partial and mysterious as her dreams.
Postromanticism.com, the international movement I started with the sculptor Leonardo Pereznieto in 2002, is all about celebrating the joy of beauty, pleasure and sensuality in contemporary art and in life as well. I also wanted to offer art lovers an alternative to abstract postmodern art. Quite justifiably, we believe that there’s a fine line between sensuality and sexuality. We also believe that there’s a difference between pornography and art. In fact, these two distinctions often blend together: we tend to regard art as sensual and pornography as more overtly sexual. Warding off the charge of pornography, photography, sculpture and painting often veil the human body, especially the more eroticized female nude, by representing it in aesthetic poses and allegorical situations that evoke thoughts, emotions and dreams, not only carnal desires.
If the boundary between pornography and art is so heatedly debated, however, it’s partly because it’s drawn by our own subjective reactions. Romantic and postromantic art confront this problem by illustrating palpably the distinction between sensuality and sexuality. Like Romantic art, postromantic art celebrates the beauty of the human body and of sensual images and relations. I invoke the broad concept of beauty (in the abstract) only to limit it to a category that’s easier to define and more relevant to postromantic art: the beauty of sensuality. Let me explain why.
Philosophers, from Plato and Plotinus to Shaftesbury and Diderot, despite their overwhelming differences, have described beauty as an underlying harmony that has a pleasing sensory effect. In so doing, aesthetic philosophers confront several problems already anticipated by Socrates in The Symposium—Plato’s dialogue that deals most directly with subjects of love and beauty. How can we account for changing standards of beauty? What draws us to the beautiful? Is there an underlying notion of beauty that can apply equally well to the magic of a sunset, a pretty woman and a beautiful painting? And if there is, then how can such a general definition serve to explain specific categories of the beautiful, such as the beauty of human beings, of emotions, of architecture or of classical art? Moreover, is it really helpful to define beauty in terms of other difficult concepts, such as harmony, order or agreeability? Doesn’t this process lead to an infinite regress of definitions, each unknown defined in terms of yet another unknown, as Socrates had cautioned? Not having found satisfactory answers to these questions, I’m daunted by the difficulties inherent in defining beauty in the abstract. The beauty of sensual images and objects seems to me a more approachable subject as well as one that’s more useful to understanding Romantic and postromantic art. So let us ask: what is sensuality? And why does it have the power to move us?
As is customary, I’ll begin with a provisional definition. Sensuality is that which titillates the senses without making any specific promises or, much less, delivering. Sensuality leaves our desires, wishes, expectations, emotions, thoughts and impulses in a state of confusion and ambiguity. It provokes what Descartes called a sense of “admiration” or “wonder” that is inseparable from pleasure yet far removed from satisfaction.
Sensuality has little to do with degrees of unveiling, with explicitness. Like sexuality—its foil and companion—it’s more of a psychological rather than physical state. Just imagine the following images placed side by side: one featuring a woman who is fully dressed, with bright red lips puckered in a kiss and a come-hither gaze. Her body is clothed, but her (supposed, staged) intent is crystal-clear. The effect is sexual. Now imagine a picture of a woman who is completely nude. Her looks are understated; her demeanor and glance ambiguous. The viewer is not sure what she desires, thinks or feels. Physically she is revealed. Psychologically, however, she remains a mystery, an enticement. The effect is sensual.
These hypothetical examples lead me to supplement my initial description of sensuality. I will now say that sensuality hints at human subjectivity—at implicit desires, needs, dreams and thoughts—in both the viewer and the viewed. Sexual images and imagery–even when the women or men represented are clothed—tend to strip the image of its psychological content, reducing it to a few body parts in the viewed and a few analogous needs in the viewers. By way of contrast, sensuality, even when the women or men represented are nude, veils the body in a psychological richness and depth that touches upon the artistic.
To probe a little further the nature of sensuality, let us consider another illustration. I’ll borrow my second example from Pedro Almodovar’s Talk to Her (Hable con Ella), one of my favorite movies. The story focuses upon the obsessive love and desire of Benigno, a male nurse, for a young and beautiful ballerina named Alicia. Upon meeting her, Benigno is entirely captivated by the young woman. Yet he doesn’t get the opportunity to know Alicia and neither do we, the viewers. Almost as soon as they meet, she’s hit by a car when crossing the street and lapses into a coma. Consequently all viewers see of Alicia after the accident is her body, her purely physical beauty. Conversely, as Benigno takes care of his beloved, talks to her and treats her as a human being capable of understanding and responding to him, we become intimately familiar with his personality. We come to understand his loneliness, his obsessive love, his uncontrollable urges, his unwavering devotion.
In coming to multidimensional life for Benigno, however, Alicia also comes to life before our eyes. Almodovar has the immense talent of bringing out psychological richness and intensity in sensual depictions of physical beauty. Through Benigno’s loving gaze, care and compassion, we see more in Alicia than a beautiful body even though that’s exactly what she has been reduced to as a result of the car accident. Sensual art and photography can perform the same magical operation as this movie. They give birth to a soul, to a living personality, in representing sometimes nothing more than the body, its movements and expressions. Which is why our own responses to these images tend to be more complex than physical desire. Sensual photography, literature and art call for the viewer’s or reader’s participation in imagining another person, another life. They’re not just stimulating; they’re also creative.
Philosophers have long been fascinated by the way in which sensuality rivets the attention and excites the mind. Although René Descartes is best known for being the father of rationalism, he’s also one of the most sensitive readers of sensuality and emotion. His reflections on the subject were prompted by his discussions with Princess Elizabeth of Bohemia and Queen Christina of Sweden, both of whom were cultivated, sensitive women who found that Cartesian rationalism could not explain the better part of human behavior. Why do we fall in love? Why do we desire? Why do we feel emotion? Why do we respond to beauty? To address these important questions, Descartes wrote The Passions of the Soul (1649).
That which touches our senses, thoughts and feelings, the philosopher explains, ignites the response of admiration or marvel. Admiration is not a coup de foudre, or the feeling of falling in love on the spot. It is, in Descartes’ own words, “a sudden surprise of the soul which manifests itself in considering with special attention objects which seem rare and extraordinary.” (The Passions of the Soul, 116) To catch our attention, these objects or subjects have to either be or appear to be rare and special. Alicia may have been an ordinary girl, but in Aldomovar’s movie, despite being deprived of the capacity to think, feel and speak, she appeared tragically unique in her predicament, sympathetic, moving.
Sensual images or scenarios—especially when artistic–have the power to transform what may be ordinary into something–or someone—quite extraordinary. In turn, as Descartes elaborates, our appreciation of sensual beauty has calmer, more thoughtful manifestations than stimulating our visceral drives and emotions: “And this passion has something special about it since we don’t notice that it’s accompanied by any transformation of the heart or the blood as we do with the other passions.” (116) Which is not to say that this more psychological form of passion is less powerful. On the contrary, as Descartes explains: “Which doesn’t prevent it from having a lot of force, caused by surprise or marvel, which is to say, the sudden and unforeseen reception of an impression which changes the movements of the soul.” (117)
For Descartes, passion is the opposite of action. An action is something one does through an act of will. By way of contrast, a passion is what happens to someone more or less involuntarily. Not all passions, however, overwhelm the senses and unleash complex sensations, thoughts and feelings. In fact, the kind of passions that provoke such unsettling, exciting movements—that attract our admiration–are quite rare. So how do sensual representations motivate, to use Descartes’ expression, the movements of the soul? By triggering complex forms of identification in us, the readers or viewers. By taking a two-dimensional image on a screen or series of words on a page and creating the contours of other human beings with rare powers to captivate the attention and inspire the imagination. Sensual photography, creative writing, cinema and art reflect back into our eyes not so much another human being as our own complexity. The philosopher and mystic Simone Weil has said that when a very pretty woman looks in the mirror, she doesn’t realize there’s more to her than external beauty. Whereas when an unattractive woman looks in the mirror, she knows there’s more to her than what she sees. In sensual Romantic and postromantic art and literature, it’s apparent that beautiful and sensual images conceal much more than meets the eye.
David Graux was born in Besançon, France in 1970, where he still lives and works. He has experimented with different styles before finding his own unique artistic touch. His main subject is the beauty and mystery of woman, evoked both through his sensual nudes and through the symbolic richness and Oriental motifs of his colorful backgrounds. His paintings are, in effect, forms of tangible poetry.
Even David Graux’s titles exude poetry, let alone his evocative art. “The shadow of the wind,” “Grazed sigh,” “The echo of a dream” all suggest the last breath of Romanticism as it meets the impenetrable mystery of Symbolism. As in Symbolist poetry, Graux’s art combines the accessible with the unintelligible. The beautiful nudes are palpably accessible: sensual, classic, in private poses that excite the curiosity, stimulating dream, but not desire. Yet the Oriental symbols—invented by the artist and belonging only to the language of his own imagination–are ungraspable. They touch upon the playful and the abstract, never fading into mere background or ornamentation. On the contrary, they travel the surface of the paintings, functioning as background and foreground alike–as an enveloping atmosphere–to the ethereal nudes.
David Graux’s art, like all forms of poetic expression, is inherently philosophical. It captures the essence of a significant aspect of human existence: the way in which what seems most transparent, accessible, real and temporal is simultaneously illegible, distant and unattainable.
Even though I don’t believe that photography replaced realist art, I must admit that when you combine the visual appeal of artistic photography with flowing movement and beautiful music, you get magical results.
Perhaps only film can unite all the arts in such a spectacular manner. I have recently run accross on youtube.com upon Elia Iglesias‘ channel of artistic photography, which she calls “poetic sensuality“. Indeed! This phrase captures it well, but to become lost in the enchantment you’ll have to take a look at the video link below:
Passion was the core of the Romantic movement and it is also, along with sensuality and the appreciation of beauty, the focal point of postromanticism. Sensuality and passion hardly seem separable since we tend to experience them together. It’s nearly impossible to imagine passion without the excitement, agitation and upheaval of the senses and emotions that we associate with sensuality. At the same time, however, sensuality and passion are opposites. Sensuality is the acute sensibility to beauty and to the myriad of potential delights it promises. It’s a way of seeing beauty in the world, in both human beings and objects. Such beauty is so vast and all-pervasive— kalon, or sea of beauty as Plato’s prophetess, Diotima had depicted—that it’s not necessarily anchored by any preference or bound by any attachment. Every week we may gaze at dozens of attractive persons, inspiring scenes and beautiful paintings or sculptures. Sensuality moves our eyes from object to object, stirring our desires, dreams and solipsistic emotions, but not necessarily capturing our devotion.
Much as sensuality, in its link to perception, evokes the aesthetic and epistemological dimensions of postromanticism, passion constitutes its ethics. This doesn’t mean that postromanticism mandates that human beings should not appreciate a multitude of objects or beings. But it does unabashedly declare: love is special. Many of us fall passionately in love and such feelings are so miraculous that they seem to defy explanation. Yet, at the same time, they are so important that they have inspired thousands of writers, poets, philosophers and artists throughout human history to depict passionate love. Not everyone does or should fall deeply in love. But those who do, we tend to believe, are very fortunate. If passionate love is a privileged form of human experience that has intrigued us for millennia, then it’s certainly worth valorizing it in our times.
Like Romanticism, postromanticism focuses above all on the expression of passionate love. Yet, in our day and age–an age so imbued with feminine and feminist sensibilities–one can no longer speak of the asymmetrical love between a male poet or artist and his ethereal muse, which has long been the dominant cliché of Romanticism. Postromantic love is reciprocal and symmetrical. Nor does postromanticism preserve the instrumental view of passion as a means of reaching something higher than human experience; of moving from the human to the divine, as we see in idealist traditions of love from Plato, to the Renaissance neoplatonists, to the Romantics. In Postromantic poetry, literature and art, passion begins with earthly existence and never transcends it.
Definition: So what is postromantic passion? Above all, passion is a focalization of the senses, thoughts and emotions upon one primary subject. I call it an ethics because it implies considering at every step one’s attitude and actions towards the beloved and, conversely, his or her actions and feelings towards oneself.
The transcendent in the contingent: The beloved is not randomly chosen. Even if meeting him or her occurs by accident—as do most human encounters—the fit between the lovers feels so right that it appears to be determined by a higher force. The intervention of that higher force cannot be proven. Nonetheless, it has a certain metonymic logic similar to the one described by the Stoics, who perceived the imprint of divine will in the beauty and harmony of the universe. Postromanticism thus spiritualizes, but only gently and lightly, passionate love. It doesn’t necessarily express a belief in divinity, but rather an elevation of emotion and humanity. Passionate love is that which uplifts one’s creative and life energies, as if by force of destiny, with the elegance, sense of wonder and inevitability of something that appears to transcend human experience.
The artist and the muse: With so many successful female artists in the world and, more generally, with so many women encouraged to pursue their talents, it’s impossible nowadays to retain the Romantic idea of the artist as male and the muse as female. When the passion is shared, both members of the couple can inspire and engage in creativity.
Idealization and lucidity: While Romanticism tends towards the idealization of the beloved, postromanticism claims that the beauty of love and of the beloved often lies in his or her imperfection. For the Romantic poets the muse was otherworldly. Only through her nonexistence could she embody aesthetic ideals. She wasn’t a woman, but a fantasy, a dream. In postromanticism, however, the source of inspiration is not a “crystallized” or idealized object of the imagination—as the novelist Stendhal had described love–but a contingent person who is known in the smallest details of his or her reality. Which is not to say that postromanticism follows the legacy of realism or naturalism. In postromanticism, unlike in naturalism, the mundane aspects of the lovers and of love itself never become scientifically predictable, mythical or grotesque, as they do, for instance, in Zola’s naturalist fiction. Postromanticism declares: real love is endearing and unique; a product of a rare fit between two individuals who, through their mutual devotion, create lasting values in an ephemeral life.
Focalization: We tend assume that the Romantic life is synonymous with the adventurous life, the life of an emotional tourist: traveling everywhere; having a multiplicity of relationships; experiencing each type of woman or man as one samples exotic dishes from distant parts of the world. Yet when one glides only on the surface of human existence, it’s difficult to be immersed in passion. For passion requires time to become deeper, richer and more intimate; it requires focalization so that it will not disperse and become a flash of intensity that’s one episode among a hundred others. In losing focus, passion also loses intensity and significance. It ceases to exist.
Energy: Passion is a mutual consumption that gives rather than depleting energy. Like a windmill, like any rhythmic movement, it generates while absorbing energy, but not all by itself, but from the external impetus of two individuals’ continual efforts to live for and with each other.
Symmetry: Passion is constantly reinforced by symmetrical dialogue. The lovers negotiate everything and feel equal in the relationship. Which doesn’t mean that they’re identical. In fact, often passion becomes more exciting when the lovers share differences in temperament, point of view and opinion. Yet there are no conventional gender roles in postromanticism. One person is not necessarily more submissive, the other more authoritative; one person is not necessarily more emotive, the other more rational. The differences are unique to each couple, not necessarily polarized. They are diffused, varied and less predictable than in the Romantic complementarity between masculine and feminine roles.
Reciprocity: Reciprocity, which was largely ignored by the Romantic movement, is the pillar of postromanticism. Passion that is mostly solipsistic—one human being’s dream or projection upon an idealized person—is not real. It may represent desire or even a strong infatuation. But only once feelings, thoughts and desires are shared, do we enter the realm of passionate love.
Proximity and distance: The Romantic male artists and their muses, even when they coupled in real life, appeared infinitely distant in art because the descriptions of women were so often veiled and disguised. The Romantics privileged the metaphors of woman as muse, angel, Salomé or femme fatale; of woman as all the more desirable because mysterious, multiple, changing and unattainable. In this tantalizing play and disguise of feminine identity, the difference between Romanticism, modernism and postmodernism is almost effaced. Postromanticism doesn’t need feminine mystery and masquerade to cultivate desire and love. Which doesn’t mean that it assumes love to be transparent. Postromanticism trusts that passionate love can generate its own dynamics: a constant movement between creating and lowering barriers which, unlike the Romantic vision of the femme fatale who fans desire through strategic advancements and withdrawals, is reciprocal, genuine and spontaneous.
Breathing: Passion is nourished by a proximity and intensity of communication so strong that it seems as if the lovers are breathing each other’s air. Without suffocating. The withdrawals are themselves part of the process of breathing. They are periods of inhaling air, of absorbing life experience and knowledge, in order to exhale it back to one another; to have a renewed life energy to offer one’s beloved.
Thinking: Postromantic passion is characterized by a rhythm and emotion which are genuine and spontaneous yet thoughtful at the same time. In this respect, it resembles Wordsworth’s Romanticism, which described passion as a processed and thoughtful rather than immediate and visceral emotion. Without the mediation of thought, passion risks being just a passing fancy; a gust of wind. And winds quickly change direction. Passion is a symbiotic relation between two individuals who enable each other to interconnect the important aspects of human life, including sensation, emotion and thought. Passion engages all of our human faculties.
Devotion: Passion is an enduring devotion. It’s not necessarily a commitment or responsibility in the way more institutionalized relations are, where the primary connection is external to the relationship. In other words, in passion the connection is not made by conventional morality and law. But the result is even more spectacular. Because devotion, a term evocative of religious experience, has transcendental dimensions. Passion is a secular form of adoration.
Fidelity: We tend to believe that virtue is a more reliable foundation for fidelity than passion, but postromanticism says that’s not the case. Virtue is often tested in the face of temptation and experienced as a tension between conscience and desire. All too often, the desire is more immediate, easier to satisfy and stronger. Passion reduces that tension and alleviates its pangs. In passion, the obsessive desire and focus upon a primary object is so strong that the energy left for others is weaker and more superficial, thus not posing a real threat to the relationship.
Jealousy and Possessiveness: If philosophers from Plato to Kant cautioned against passion, it’s largely because they associated it with negative emotions such as jealousy, possessiveness and hatred, which occur when love turns full circle and collapses upon itself. The Romantics, from Goethe to Constant, often confirmed this negative impression in describing how the force of passion leads to madness, murder and suicide. It’s undoubtedly true that passion is often accompanied by feelings of jealousy and possessiveness. Yet that’s not necessarily a bad sign. In moderation, jealousy and possessiveness may constitute a declaration of love. They can express: I know you desire others and that others are desirable to me, but I need and am grateful for the uniqueness of our attraction and feelings. Jealousy, in moderation, rekindles the flame of passion. It suggests: out of all the desirable persons we meet, I still chose you and you me. Jealousy in excess snuffs out the flame of passion. It suggests: I don’t trust you; you’re not freely mine. Rather than loving you, I possess you.
Ritual: Passion is a cherished ritual rather than a habit. A repetition of activities that appear always new, always exciting, because they’re primarily motivated by emotions and desires. In lasting love, one needs the repetition of activities as one needs to breathe air or eat regularly, rather than going through the motions today out of inertia, because one did it yesterday. In its rhythm and intensity, the repetition of acts in passionate love—going to a movie, dining out–resembles the repetition of religious rituals.
Erotism: Postromantic passion is erotic in a way that’s intensely sensual and at the same time different from diffused sensuality. In passion, the physical longing for someone is stimulated by knowledge and love of that person, rather than the love being motivated primarily by desire. That’s what makes passion different from the multiplicity of human attraction. While sensuality is a feast for the senses, passion offers food for the soul. Postromanticism places passion at its center, declaring: life and art would be emptier and more impoverished without such exquisite nourishment.
