For the invisible things of him from the creation
of the world are clearly seen, being understood by the things
that are made, even his eternal power and Godhead . . .
St. Paul, Romans 1:20
Out of the foaming ferment of finitude
Spirit rises up fragrantly.
Hegel, Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion
It is at the same time true that the world
is what we see and that, nonetheless, we must learn
to see it-first in the sense that we must match this vision
with knowledge, take possession of it, say what
we and what seeing are, act therefore as if we knew nothing
about it, as if here we still had everything to learn.
Merleau-Ponty, The Visible and the Invisible
When I first started emailing
Brian Sweeney about his
selection of photos for this book
he quoted Ralph Waldo Emerson-"the sky
is the daily bread of the eye."
The idea that nature is at once
commonplace reality and uncommon
sustenance-as in The Lord's Prayer, "give
us this day our daily bread"-is at the heart
of Sweeney's vision.
He mentioned he found the quote
on a website dedicated to the Concord
Transcendentalists. No doubt I should
have, but from here in New Zealand I
didn't realize that Emerson and Thoreau
and their group were based around the
little town of Concord in Massachusetts, New England. I assumed that Concord
referred to a jet. And that the Concord
Transcendentalists must be a modern
movement finding inspiration in nature
while on the fly! Of course, I realized my
mistake when I checked out the website.
But for Sweeney at least I reckon Concord
Transcendentalist in my misguided sense
fits perfectly.
So many of Sweeney's photographs are
meditations on flight. From the air he sees
the ground transpire beneath him. From
the ground he lift his eyes into the light.
Even when he is not physically on the
move, his imagination takes off over earth
and sea, beyond horizons.
Sweeney's business sees him fly
regularly between New Zealand and New
York. Over the years he has tracked his
movement between these two poles on
a modest Canon with everyday Kodak
film and a medium-sized zoom. His
photos, whether taken at pace or rest, are
invariably soaring-and picture nature
full of meaning, even as it surpasses
understanding.
Sweeney makes no attempt to trick out
what he sees with high-end gear or intricate
after-effects. His equipment is middle-ofthe-
road, but his eye is passionate and his
vision of the world, religious.
Historian of Religions Mircea Eliade,
in his classic 1957 book The Sacred and
the Profane, contrasts the attitude and
experience of religious man to that of nonreligious man. For religious man, nature is
never only natural; it is shot through with
a sense of the sacred. But for non-religious
man-a comparatively recent mode of
being-the cosmos has been desacralized
and is only ever what it is and nothing
more. For the non-religious man, nature
may of course be pleasing and in its way
uplifting, but not in a way that connects
him to a higher power.
(Let us say from the get-go that these
two modes of being are often-and most
often superficially-contrasted in the
person of the artist on the one hand, who
reputedly looks up, and on the other the
businessman, characterized as obdurately
down to earth. So, for Sweeney, artist and
businessman at once, the idea of the sacred
and the profane is already going to be
contested and complex.)
Eliade uses the term hierophany to
describe the manifestation of the sacred in
everyday life. In a hierophany the sacred is
witnessed as something absolutely different
from the profane. But crucially and
paradoxically, it is only ever through the
profane that the sacred manifests itself.
By manifesting the sacred, any object
becomes something else, yet
it continues to remain itself, for it
continues to participate in its surrounding
cosmic milieu. A sacred
stone remains a stone; apparently
(or, more precisely, from the profane
point of view), nothing distinguishes
it from all other stones. But
for those to whom a stone reveals
itself as sacred, its immediate reality
is transmuted into supernatural
reality.1
The photographs in Sweeney's
Paradise Road envision the world around
us in its grandeur and banality as a sacred
milieu to the very extent that it is not.
Sweeney's photos reveal that the place
apart is no distance from the way well
traveled. Of course, the word "paradise"
tells us to look up. But then again the word
"road" advises that we keep our feet on the
ground. If paradise is a place apart, road is
a way in common.
The nineteenth-century Transcendentalists
made a cult of nature. Not only did
nature in its grand and overpowering
aspect communicate the infinite-in the
sense of the sublime which exercised
the imaginations of eighteenth-century
artists and thinkers taking their lead from
Edmund Burke-but also in its quiet and
intimate moments. It is not only the raging
storm, the frenzied surf, the blizzard, or
the precipice that awes man with infinity,
but also the contemplation of undisturbed
nature. In his essay "Nature," Emerson
writes:
I become a transparent eye-ball; I am
nothing; I see all; the currents of the
Universal Being circulate through
me; I am part or particle of God . . .
I am the lover of uncontained and
immortal beauty. In the wilderness,
I find something more dear and connate
than in streets or villages. In the
tranquil landscape, and especially in
the distant line of the horizon, man
beholds somewhat as beautiful as
his own nature.2
Brian Sweeney might well agree with
Emerson that "the happiest man is he who
learns from nature the lesson of worship."
The proper focus of worship was on
Emerson's mind when he was invited to
address the Harvard Divinity School on
Sunday, July 15, 1838. He complained
that organized religion had failed to
communicate man's own infinite nature
through an engaged appreciation of the
outdoors:
In how many churches, by how
many prophets, tell me, is man
made sensible that he is an infinite
Soul; that the earth and heavens
are passing into his mind; that he
is drinking forever the soul of God?
Where now sounds the persuasion,
that by its very melody imparadises
my heart, and so affirms its own origin
in heaven?3
According to Emerson, the Churches
had lost their way. By seeking to separate
the sacred from the profane-and hoard
it instead around their own buildings,
vestments, and rituals-they had in fact
lost touch with the sacred and diminished
human nature at the same time. His
words caused a scandal-especially as he
advocated that the real miracle was nature
and repudiated the need to believe in the
supernatural miracles of Jesus.
The evaporation of the sacred from
modern consciousness might be seen as
an effect of organized religion's attempt
to hold it apart. Certainly, Western man
now tends to occupy a stubbornly profane
cosmos diminishing him against its brute
immensity, rather than exalting him
through common cause.
Of course, non-religious man, in so far
as this is an active role, attempts his own
[tragic] grandeur by refusing any appeal
to transcendence, seeking instead to raise
himself up by himself. As Eliade explains,
non-religious man:
makes himself, and he only makes
himself completely in proportion
as he desacralizes himself and the
world. The sacred is the prime obstacle
to his freedom. He will become
himself only when he is completely
demysticized. He will not
be truly free until he has killed the
last god.4
Intriguingly, however, Eliade goes on to
point out that, whether he likes it or not,
non-religious man is a direct descendant
of religious man. To the extent that nonreligious
man has sought to purify himself
from the beliefs and observances of his
ancestors, those very behaviors continue to
structure his existence.
He forms himself by a series of denials
and refusals, but he continues
to be haunted by the realities that he
has refused and denied. To acquire
a world of his own he has desacralized
the world in which his ancestors
lived; but to do so he has been
obliged to adopt the opposite of an
earlier form of behavior, and that behavior
is still emotionally present to
him, in one form or another, ready to
be reactualized in his deepest being.5
In other words, while we may have
lost a religious outlook, there are certain
modalities of nature that continue to move
us on a symbolic and/or unconscious level.
No doubt this is part of the power of Brian
Sweeney's photographs in Paradise Road.
Even if we don't view them through the
eyes of faith, his keenly discriminated
images of sky, clouds, horizons, mountains,
water, and trees will nevertheless strike us
with an atavistic sense of the sacred power
of nature.
The sky is a recurrent symbol in
Sweeney's work. As Eliade explains:
Simple contemplation of the celestial
vault already provokes a religious
experience . . . Transcendence
is revealed by simple awareness of
infinite height. 'Most high' spontaneously
becomes an attribute of divinity.
6
Whether he is on the ground looking
up at the sky, or in the sky looking out or
down, Sweeney's heavens are invariably
shot through with clouds. Clouds have a
transitional quality, linking the sky with
the earth, the high with the low, the sacred
with the profane. (In this respect, they offer
a perfect path for Sweeney's imagination,
as he seeks to invest the everyday and
sometimes overlooked world with higher
value.)
Perhaps, too, clouds for Sweeney are
particularly seeded with meaning, given
that the Maori name for New Zealand is
Aotearoa-literally, "the land of the long
white cloud." Named by the legendary
navigator Kupe, traveling across the vast
Pacific from his homeland Hawaiki, the
band of clouds on the horizon were a
portent of landfall and a new world.
Like the sky itself, clouds have a long
history in religious belief. In various
mystical traditions clouds express the
unknowable nature of the divine (for
example, The Cloud of Unknowing, a
medieval work of Christian mysticism).
When clouds lift or clouds part,
something hidden is revealed. This in itself
has a religious drift to it. When the clouds
part, we glimpse the light. Veiling God, too
terrible for human eye, the cloud already
symbolizes the presence of God.
Early in religious evolution, the cloud
was a symbol of the Mesopotamian storm
gods; and in Egypt of the creation deity.
Later, as Jacqueline Taylor Basker outlines
in her fascinating essay "The Cloud as
Symbol: Destruction or Dialogue":
The Ancient Hebrews adapted the
image of the cloud for Yahweh. As
an aniconic people, who could not
use a tangible material image to represent
their god, the cloud provided
a convenient insubstantial object to
use as a visible symbol. During the
wanderings of the Jews in the desert,
the cloud hovers over or in the
'tent of witness' and plays a symbolic
role as a recurrent theophany
(an appearance of the Divine) in
Old Testament scripture to witness
the presence of God.7
The Old Testament use of cloud
symbolism continues in the New, now
underlying the divine nature of Christ, as
we see in the Transfiguration described in
the Gospel of Matthew (17:5):
While he was still speaking, a bright
cloud enveloped them, and a voice
from the cloud said, 'This is my
Son, whom I love; with him I am
well pleased. Listen to him!'
Sweeney's use of cloud imagery is rich
and multivalent. His cloud formations
can recall religious ideas about the eye of
God or clouds of glory, while also evoking
secular notions of castles in the sky-or,
in opposite mood, mushroom clouds and
nuclear destruction.
Equally as powerful as sky and cloud
in Sweeney's symbolic world is water. In
religious myth, water precedes creation. We
sense this in Sweeney's spectacular series of
horizon photos taken from Raumati where
he sometimes lives on the lower West Coast
of New Zealand's North Island. In these
images, where water meets sky in changing
light, it is as if the void takes shape-a
creation myth enacted for his lens. For
Sweeney, who grew up Roman Catholic,
the first verses of Genesis would surely
have inspired his vision:
In the beginning God created the
heaven and the earth. And the earth
was without form, and void; and
darkness was upon the face of the
deep. And the Spirit of God moved
upon the face of the waters. And
God said, 'Let there be light': and
there was light. And God saw the
light, that it was good: and God divided
the light from the darkness.
Water symbolizes creative potential.
The actual world of form and endeavor
emerges out of water and ultimately
dissolves back into it, purified and
washed clean. As Eliade says, water is
the "reservoir of all the possibilities of
existence." Likewise, the horizon line
opens us up to unlimited possibility,
releasing us from life as it has taken shape
around us and into the infinite beyond.
"The health of the eye," wrote Emerson,
"seems to demand a horizon. We are never
tired, so long as we can see far enough."8
In conversation, Sweeney often talks
about the restorative effect of horizons, and
in particular how this view from Raumati
used to excite his wonder about what
might lie ahead for him-a virtuality that
became actual when he left these islands
surrounded by water to reimagine himself
on the island of Manhattan.
For Sweeney the cultural and business
opportunity of America is a promised
land that called him forth. New York in
particular is the symbolic and storied center
of the world, especially compared to New
Zealand geographically and by association
culturally on the edge of the world. But
just as the sacred and the profane are
necessarily coterminous for religious man,
the center and the edge fold over each other
for Sweeney. Hence, in his photography, he
brings together nature-symbolized by the
New Zealand landscape-and culture-
symbolized by New York.
Traditionally, as we have seen, it is
nature that is commonly invested with
centrality or sacrality. Culture, on the
other hand, is man-made, temporal, and
by comparison regarded as peripheral. So,
already in Sweeney's work there is a certain
displacement if not inversion between
the idea of New Zealand and New York.
According to this reading New Zealand
would be a natural paradise and central
while New York, teeming and distracted,
would be far flung and on the edge.
But the more we contemplate Sweeney's
photographs, the more we find these bipolar
world views artfully turned upsidedown-
his framing of nature is determined
by both the history of religion and of art
(and in this way are mediated or unnatural;
while his urban views, equally mediated by
art history, are presented as natural pieces
of infinity.
You can see this for example in his
image Aoraki Mt Cook. It speaks of
incomparable natural splendor. As Sweeney
says in conversation, "If mountains were
show business this would be Broadway."
At the same time, we can't help but be
aware of its "chocolate box" vista-a view
a million other travelers have snapped in
passing as they seek to eff its ineffability.
Whether conscious or unconscious, the
historical religious significance of such
a sight is overwhelming-the mountain
surrounded by water and piercing the
clouds is a universal paradisiacal image-
and yet for this very reason, to our welltutored
eye, the image can also be read as a
familiar effect of enculturation.
In Sweeney's images, then, the sacred
and the profane are in studied tension. In
fact, it is along the horizon line of these two
modes of perception that his images send
our spirit flying.
Again we experience something like this
in his photo Road. This was taken on a road
less traveled near Lake Taupo in the central
North Island of New Zealand-for those
in the know, site of a massive eruption in
180 ce, recorded to have turned the sky red
over China and Rome. All memory of such
a cataclysmic past is absent in this beatific
image. Sweeney says that he instantly
recognized the image he wanted. He had
his own road to Damascus experience. He
stopped the car and took this single shot:
light diffused through foreground trees,
nimbus backed up over intervening hills
. . . The shine and dip of tarmac curving
elegiacally from sight, entering darkness
before any promise of ascent . . .
At the same time as we appreciate the
hallowed features of this journey along
what we also know is just a mundane
stretch of road, we recognize its precedents
in the documentary vision of American
roads by photographers such as Edward
Weston (New Mexico Highway, 1937),
Dorothea Lange (The Road West, 1938), or
Robert Frank (US 285, New Mexico, 1955).
Not a lonely country road at all, Sweeney's
road turns out to be well traveled. And
so, once again, not simply a spontaneous
epiphany in the landscape, but a complicity
of nature and culture, a charge of insight
along the horizon line of the purportedly
sacred and the allegedly temporal.
Again, Sweeney's cloud photos,
which on the face of it seem to be a
series of spontaneous visual prayers, can
simultaneously be viewed as meditations
on the history of art and photography-
the Renaissance Assumptions and
Transfigurations; the iconic puffed
clouds of Magritte; the 1960s and 1970s
cloudscapes of Georgia O'Keeffe (like
Sweeney, mesmerized by views from
airplane windows). Or Edward Weston's
photographs of towering and striated
Mexican clouds from the mid-1920s; Alfred
Steiglitz's aerial views in his Equivalent
series of photos from the 1920s and 1930s;
Ansell Adams, Minor White, Ralph Steiner
. . . the cloud chasers followed by Sweeney
goes on. And his other-worldly view of
nature is revealed-and is revealing-as
self-consciously worldly.
Whereas the Transcendentalists
needed to escape from towns and cities to
commune with nature, Sweeney continues
to find in manufactured landscapes
and urban environments many of the
classic symbols and attitudes of religious
man-trees and lights, changing seasons,
views from high, views looking up.
For Sweeney, the city is second nature-and
as such his images here, to the very extent
that they are commonplace, have the
same revelatory effect as his scenes along
backcountry roads or distant flight-paths.
Sweeney sees the light in things that
someone else might regard as obscure,
banal, incidental, or incomplete. A simple
lamp in a hotel room; a chandelier in City
Hall, New York, glimpsed from the street
outside; a Philippe Starck lightwork in
Paris' Baccarat Museum of Crystal. These
three photos of fragments from bigger
pictures-scraps from various excursions,
but linked in his consciousness by a
comparable glow-all communicate the
religious insight of God shedding light to
the world. Three modest infinities ripped
out of time.
Each impression or passing moment,
each lived experience relived through art is
a fecundity, a sheer paradise. For Sweeney,
New York itself is a paradise, insofar as
it allows him to enter into the spirit of
photographers like Steiglitz, Steichen, or
Kertesz who made the pilgrimage before
him and like him made the city their home.
Sweeney himself lives above Madison
Square Park across from the Flatiron
Building, and Edward Steichen's iconic
1904 photograph powerfully haunts his
own perception of the landmark.
Just as we feel the presence and spirit of
others in his photographs, Sweeney often
invokes in us the corporeality of seeing
itself: the blur of motion, the play of light
or streak of moisture on a window, the hint
of the means of travel that sweeps the eye
through the world.
This at the same time as he playfully
acknowledges both the similarities and
the differences in his worldview from the
nature lovers and Transcendentalists who
have passed before him. So, in his triptych
of images from Britain's Lake District,
we don't see any tranquil, Wordsworthian
view of rolling fields, glistening water, or
stone fences.
Instead, we catch a blurry view from
a moving car of straggly roadsides that
could be anywhere, but which nevertheless
communicate the singular and exhilarating
sense of an eye on the move, transported
by the scene as much as it is transported
through the scene.
Likewise, the diptych of photos
that look like abstract expressionist
paintings, but are actually the runway
at speed at La Guardia Airport, inspirit
a sense of timelessness in the very blur
of time passing. (For the traditional
Transcendentalists, infinity is best
approached on foot. But for Sweeney,
a Concord Transcendentalist in my
misguided sense, infinity can also be
grasped at speed.)
For Sweeney, vision itself is a miracle
given off by the rub of embodied eye and
physical world. When I look at his photos,
I am reminded of Merleau-Ponty reflecting
on the act of seeing and perceiving:
My movements and the movements
of my eyes make the world vibrate . . .
With each flutter of my eyelashes a
curtain lowers and rises, though I do
not think for an instant of imputing
this eclipse to the things themselves;
with each movement of my eyes that
sweep the space before me the things
suffer a brief torsion, which I also
ascribe to myself; and when I walk
in the street with my eyes fixed on
the horizon of the houses, the whole
of the setting near at hand quivers
with each footfall on the asphalt,
then settles down in its place.9
How we see, of course, both physically
and culturally, determines what we see.
(To make my point I take two photographs
that aren't part of Paradise Road, but
can be glimpsed along the verge.) We
are culturally pre-determined to find
revelatory experiences in certain places,
like the photographers in Sweeney's photo
of the crowd in the Louvre snapping at
the Mona Lisa.
Perhaps this crowd in a hurry is a wry
comment on Sweeney himself-although,
as we have seen, he embraces speed to
the point of stillness. But this frantic
horde of photographers, desperate to
catch their own fragment of the revelation
La Gioconda represents, appear to miss
entirely the elusive figure against her
backdrop of nature.
Sweeney on the other hand, whose eye
is quick to the edge as well as the center,
finds revelation not only in the places
that have been preordained, as in the
quiet and timelessness of the landscape
(although there as well), but also in the
blur and contemporaneity of the city-as
in a billboard of Penelope Cruz gazing
Mona Lisa-like at us as the world goes
wonderfully, blindly about its business.
January 2010
