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January 2, 2009
Photography as poesis. It is one way that an aesthetic rationality can challenge the dominant utilitarian form of instrumental economic rationality in late modernity.
Another example. There are diverse, more developed and better examples of photography as poesis.
Initially --in Plato---poesis refers to the work of art shapes the sensuous particularity of experience into an emotionally coherent totality. The work of art, as it were, interprets through metaphor in contrast to the language of philosophy and mathematics----what Descartes would called physics as science.
Plato called into question the value of expressing in metaphorical language our understanding of things. Poesis's concern is with the sensuous particular not knowledge of the truth.
Since Plato alternative views of poesis have taken over from the traditional mimetic interpretation of poesis, with the dominant interpretation highlighting the originality of individual expression of personal emotion with film and television now the main forms of public art in the common culture.That mode of expression often rests on the principle of ut pictura poesis that ties, or allies, the visual arts (historically painting) to literature (historically poetry) as sister arts.
That tradition was ruptured by modernism.
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Gary,
just for the record.The Latin phrase Ut pictura poesis is an analogy that Horace introduced in his Ars Poetica to tentatively compare the art of painting with that of poetry. Translated literally it says “as is painting, so is poetry,” implying that poetry and painting might somehow be linked. The arguments were that if linked, which one was dominant?
it wasn't until the 18th century that this tradition was questioned. Gotthold Ephraim Lessing’s Laocoön, originally published in 1766 and aptly subtitled “An Essay on the Limits of Painting and Poetry,” attacked the very theoretical core of Ut pictura poesis. Lessing considers poetry and art of time and painting an art of space; poetry addresses the ear and is played out successively in time while painting speaks to the eye and everything is laid out in one space. To transgress the border between time and space too frequently is dangerous said Lessing.
More here. It's informative.