“What art is, in reality, is the missing link, not the links which exist. It’s not what you see that is art; art is the gap.” -Marcel Duchamp, 1975
I know this is probably an old and tired topic for some of you. Hang with me for a minute. I’d like to try and add something new to this philosophy as it applies to art and photography.
Almost everyone in the art world has heard of the Japanese word (or is it words?) wabi-sabi. It’s most commonly used as a platitude for justifying bad art. That’s not what it means. It has a deeper, richer, and more enlightening purpose. And I believe it’s directly connected to the denial of death and death anxiety.
Wabi-sabi is a worldview that is centered on the acceptance of transience and imperfection. In fact, it finds the pinnacle of beauty and meaning in both. I see this philosophy as a death anxiety buffer. And it’s a very good one to employ in your life and art. Thinking deeply about our animality and our imperfection will allow us to come to terms with our fate. Albert Camus said, “There is only one liberty, to come to terms with death; thereafter, anything is possible.” I believe this is at the core of the Wabi-sabi philosophy.
The philosophy consists of these ideas: nothing is permanent, nothing is perfect, and nothing is complete. Sit with those for a minute. Allow them to seep in. If you live in the digital photography world today, or even the film world, you are bombarded with technology to make your photographs better, even perfect. As humans, we strive for perfection, which is never attainable. We want sharp focus, clean surfaces, amazing composition, and flawless light. We even want big, huge prints (physical). Everything we’ve learned about what’s important in photography is based on concepts that are exactly the opposite of wabi-sabi. That in and of itself should speak volumes to us.
“Plate #121, Bullet Holes & Feathers”-Whole Plate Palladiotype from a wet collodion negative.
As I said in the second paragraph of this essay, I believe we do this because of our denial of death. I can easily argue for that position. The desire for perfection staves off the anxiety of impermanence. We find comfort in the perceived permanence of our (archival) images. We symbolically live beyond our physical selves. Perceived perfection is achieved by the use of technology to meet cultural expectations for what the world wants, like size, sharpness, etc. And finally, completeness. Answering all of the questions both visually and philosophically as we understand them from our cultural worldview requires a kind of certitude that doesn’t really exist. We literally fool ourselves, albeit unconsciously, about what we’re doing and why. The point of all of this is to build self-esteem (to find meaning and significance in our culture), which in turn, quells our anxiety about our mortality.
Let’s talk about content as it applies to the denial of death. Have you ever seen portraits of young naked women? Have you seen luxurious scenes of wealth and affluence? Perfect prints of El Capitan or Yosemite Park? A beautiful, perfect rose or flower? Any image that shows perfection, youth, power, and strength can be directly connected to Ernest Becker’s theories on the human condition and is in direct opposition to the philosophy of wabi-sabi.
These images exist and are “popular” because they shield us from death anxiety. When I post a picture of a dying plant, a blurry portrait of a horse with poor composition, or a landscape where genocide occurred, it gives the viewer pause. The reason for this is that this kind of content acts as a death reminder; it unconsciously raises the dander (if you will) in the viewer and reminds them of their mortality. Their death anxiety is moved from a shielded place, safely out of range, to the forefront of their (subconscious) minds. And they may not even be aware of it.
I might argue that these kinds of images are not beautiful, they’re not ideal, and they’re not made to celebrate life. They are made to mask what is real. They’re made to make us hide behind an illusion that we’ll live forever, that death has no hold or power over us. They’re fake and fraudulent in the most direct ways.
Does all of this mean that you should break all of the “rules” in photography? Yes, it does. Or at least try to refrain from them having such a grip on you that you can never make pictures that are “good” enough. Allow the viewer to feel the work as much as they see it. I would recommend being open to imperfections that support your narrative. After all, they represent your own human imperfections. There is beauty in that. We resist and unconsciously dislike anything that represents our animality. Becker called us “gods with anuses." What an accurate description of how we think and what we deny.
“White Horse-Teller County, Colorado”-Whole Plate toned Cyanotype from a Calotype (paper negative).
In "Escape from Evil," Becker said, “Man is an animal who has to live in a lie in order to live at all.” He goes on to say in his book, “The Denial of Death,” “The real world is simply too terrible to admit. It tells man that he is a small trembling animal who will someday decay and die. Culture changes all of this, makes man seem important and vital to the universe. immortal in some ways.” And finally, "The idea of death, the fear of it, haunts the human animal like nothing else; it is a mainspring of human activity—designed largely to avoid the fatality of death, to overcome it by denying in some way that it is the final destiny of man."
This is a difficult concept to process, let alone be aware of—it feels counterintuitive, or maybe even that it’s not applicable to you. Yet it is very true as you come to realize how these ideas sit together in the reality of your life, and they are all applicable to every human being.
If we step back and objectively look at how we live, what we think, and how we behave (see Socrates and self-examination), we’ll quickly realize that we have a distorted view of life and living. If we pick bad illusions or immortality projects, we can end up doing a lot of damage to humanity. However, if we try to come to terms with our death (see Camus quote above) and our imperfections, even celebrate them in our art and life, I think we’ll have a better, or healthier (psychologically speaking), view of our life and our death. In the end, we’ll make better art, and moreover, we’ll have empathy and compassion for others’ imperfections; think wabi-sabi and find beauty and meaning in the imperfect. After all, that’s who we are.