Photography, for me, has always been associated with representation as mimesis, rather than a Romanticism that spurns mimesis in the name of self-revelation. The key Romantic notions include subjectivity and experience, inspiration and imagination, irony and the sublime, the fragment and the total work, violence and revolution.

This Romanticism is not that of Wordsworth and Coleridge, and not even that of Byron, Shelley, and Keats; is that of German (Jena) Romanticism that sought not only to defend art, but to extend it to the entirety of life and merging art, philosophy, religion, politics.

Where mimesis reconnects with Romanticism is around the notion of the creative subject--- the 'I' that determines creativity and freedom. Though the centre of reality for Jena Romanticism was within the individual poet or artist and it expanded outward from the artist, the point of connection is the creative artist as genius following their natural impulses and an expressive subjectivity.

Another way in which mimesis reconnects with Romanticism is the fragment conceived of as a hedgehog, rolled and close to the outside world, as in a solitary work of art or fine print. This is the artistic fragment as a radiant moment that reached beyond its own boundaries. Another form of the fragment is ruins.

Ruins suggest an absent whole; in their present of decay ruins signify loss and absence; their very presence as survival suggests endurance against the ravages of time and history.