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Studio Q Photography

Exploring Human Behavior and Death Anxiety Through Art
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“Rocky Mountain Meadow Barley"—a whole-plate photogenic drawing. The plant was laid directly on the photographic paper (silver nitrate on salted paper) and exposed to direct sunlight for a couple of minutes. Then it was washed and fixed. This process was first used by Henry Fox Talbot in England in the 1830s.

The concept of the plant making direct contact with the paper appeals to me. The most important concept is contact. This image's elegance gives rise to an intriguing story in my mind. The sunlight that gave life to the plant also created this image. The "hair" emerges when the seed is released. I think the simplicity is beautiful.

Meaning in a Meaningless World

Quinn Jacobson February 17, 2023

Peter Zapffe said, "Man is a tragic animal. Not because of his smallness, but because he is too well endowed. Man has longings and spiritual demands that reality cannot fulfill. We have expectations of a just and moral world. Man requires meaning in a meaningless world."

Like others, Zapffe was convinced that our consciousness was an evolutionary misstep. A mistake. To have a "surplus" of consciousness is too much for us to bear. We shrink from living and are afraid to die because of it. We don't necessarily fear death or dying, but rather the prospect of being forgotten—the consequences of dying. We fear impermanence and insignificance. That’s what’s unbearable to us; that’s what drives us to distractions, illusions, and denial.

Moreover, we find ourselves in a world that has no meaning. The only meaning is what we create for ourselves, and in the cosmic picture, it’s all meaningless. This idea is central to my work. This conflict creates anxiety that we need to buffer, and if we can’t buffer it, a lot of times it will manifest as anger or violence, and we will take it out on the person or people who are challenging our buffering mechanism (othering). In other words, if you challenge my worldview (my coping mechanism for death anxiety), I may lash out and want to convert you to my worldview or destroy you.

I’ve come to understand why I gravitate toward making art and having a creative life. Reading the works of the great thinkers and philosophers, it's clear to me what my attraction is to pursuing creativity versus other ways I could buffer my existential anxiety. Nietzsche said, "The truly serious task of art is to save the eye from gazing into the horrors of night and to deliver the subject by the healing balm of illusion from the spasms of the agitations of the will." That resonates deeply with me. My life has consisted of trying to unravel the problem of "othering" through art. Over the years, I’ve pulled on the threads of artists, thinkers, and philosophers before me (and those who are contemporary to me) and have used art to explore human behavior as well as buffer my own existential terror. I’m very aware of how I’ve intellectualized my impending death. Socrates claimed that the practice of philosophy in life is really a dress rehearsal for what comes in death: “… those who practice philosophy in the right way are in training for dying, and they fear death least of all men.”

When Nietzsche talks about the "truly serious task of art" being to save the eye from gazing into the horrors of night and deliver the subject from the spasms of the agitations of the will, he is speaking about the power of art to provide a form of psychological relief from existential terror.

Nietzsche believed that human existence was marked by suffering and that our awareness of this suffering could be overwhelming. In his view, the role of art was to provide a kind of escape from existential terror by creating a "healing balm of illusion" that would allow us to momentarily forget about our problems and experience a sense of peace and tranquility. I would add to that; I would argue that it allows the artist to transfer the anxiety to the work—to exercise it out of the mind, if you will. Peter Zapffe called this “sublimation”; he said it was rare but the best way to buffer anxiety. It’s rare because the majority of people choose not to have a creative life.

At the same time, Nietzsche recognized that the experience of art was not just about escaping from reality. He believed that great art had the power to transform our understanding of the world and to challenge our assumptions about what is real and what is possible.

In short, Nietzsche's comment about art's "serious task" shows how art has the power to both temporarily calm our existential terror and give our lives meaning—or at least an illusion of meaning and value.

In Art & Theory, Books, Death Anxiety, Denial of Death, Ernest Becker, Peter Zapffe, Pessimistic Philosophy, Philosophy, Photogenic Drawing, Psychology, Shadow of Sun Mountain Tags Peter Wessel Zapffe, Nietzsche, meaning, meaninglessness, meaningless, philosophy, pessimistic philosophy, art, art theory
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These calotypes are beautiful as they are. Years ago, I had a friend in Barcelona, Spain, who was working on a project about the Franco era. He made 16x20 calotypes and never printed them; he simply showed them as they were—gorgeous! I may end up doing the same thing.

When I first saw this negative, the thought of the World Trade Center towers (9/11) came to mind. The steel striations stood splintered in the rubble. This is what I saw when I was developing this negative.

I like what Whitman wrote about nature showing us the natural cycle of life and death. Whitman was a disciple of Ralph Waldo Emerson. He wrote to him often, and Emerson became a reader of Whitman’s work.

Whitman conveyed these organic notions in his poetry through a range of metaphors. Old tree trunks that are still rooted in the earth and the majority of which have been struck by lightning appear to be a metaphor for me. These kinds of pictures show us the difficulties as well as the impermanence of life.

I like the idea of using paper (a paper negative and a paper print) to make these photographs. The organic and natural cycle of these once large Ponderosa Pines (some are 200–300 years old) is memorialized in two dimensions in a photograph and reduced to a memory. And, one day, that memory will be gone and forgotten too.

The Incompleteness In Philosophy

Quinn Jacobson November 11, 2022

“If you wish to become a philosopher, the first thing to realise is that most people go through life with a whole world of beliefs that have no sort of rational justification, and that one man’s world of beliefs is apt to be incompatible with another man’s, so that they cannot both be right. People’s opinions are mainly designed to make them feel comfortable; truth, for most people is a secondary consideration.”

― Bertrand Russell, The Art of Philosophizing and other Essays (1942)

I really enjoy the study of philosophy (the love of wisdom). Over the years, I’ve read a lot of it. I’ve read everything from the old Greeks and Romans to modern thinkers, and I suppose I know just enough to be dangerous. In reality, I really don’t know much at all. I’ll save that for another time.

After reading Becker, I have a different view on philosophy. Now, it feels like the major philosophical theories are only halfway there or not complete; they feel unfinished. Russell’s quote (above) is a good example. While I completely agree with it, it doesn’t finish the thought. It falls short without Becker’s theories to complete it. All philosophy feels this way to me now: always referring to the answer but never really answering.

I'm not saying I disagree with the major philosophers about life and ideas on the human condition; on the contrary, however, I believe Becker's ideas are at the top of the philosophical pyramid. Everything, including all human behavior and thought, comes below his theories. His ideas and theories answer questions about the human condition. And they answer them definitively—at least in my mind, they do.

I know this is a bad analogy, but it’s a lot like treating the cough when you have a cold and not addressing the virus. That’s how it feels to me. I want to address the virus, not the cough. Becker gets to the heart of these matters.

I’ve always been a person who seeks the truth. I want logic and rational thought in my life. I’m not a believer in magic or superstition. In the context of life philosophy, those things seem trivial and unimportant. If there are no answers to the "big" questions, I’ll live with that. I don’t have the desire to make something up to say that I know the answer.

A good example of this today is the number of people who believe in conspiracy theories. These are "answers" that attempt to satisfy complicated questions or outright fantasies. The people who believe in these kinds of things feel empowered because they know something that most don’t. Feelings and opinions are irrelevant to me in the context of facts. I want evidence for positions and ideas put out there for discussion. This is where Russell’s quote is spot on.

I digress.

So let us address the virus, not the cough, of life's big questions. Let’s be clear and definitive when we have evidence for our position. Becker gives us those tools. He answers the most vital and important questions in life through his theories. And Solomon, Greenberg, and Pyszczynski go on and give us empirical evidence to show Becker’s theories are correct.

“We don’t want to admit that we are fundamentally dishonest about reality, that we do not really control our own lives. We don’t want to admit that we do not stand alone, that we always rely on something that transcends us, some system of ideas and powers in which we are embedded and which support us. This power is not always obvious. It need not be overtly a god or openly a stronger person, but it can be the power of an all-absorbing activity, a passion, a dedication to a game, a way of life, that like a comfortable web keeps a person buoyed up and ignorant of himself, of the fact that he does not rest on his own center. All of us are driven to be supported in a self-forgetful way, ignorant of what energies we really draw on, of the kind of lie we have fashioned in order to live securely and serenely. Augustine was a master analyst of this, as were Kierkegaard, Scheler, and Tillich in our day. They saw that man could strut and boast all he wanted, but that he really drew his “courage to be” from a god, a string of sexual conquests, a Big Brother, a flag, the proletariat, and the fetish of money and the size of a bank balance.”

—Ernest Becker

“Rocky Mountain Cotton Grass—Blown Away"—a cyanotype on waxed vellum paper. The wind is blowing away the last seeds of the Rocky Mountain cotton grass. November, 2022.

The last light of the day sets on an old Ponderosa Pine tree stump. Many years ago, it was struck by lightning.

Almost 40 paper negatives (calotypes) I’ll make more of these over the winter. This is a good start for what I want to do for the project.

In Philosophy, Ernest Becker, Bertrand Russell Tags philosophy, becker, Bertrand Russell
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