The Naked Encounter with Infinity: Situated Transcendence and the Creation of Art
“Ice cave, Upper Rush Creek Basin; LFC, V Ferguson, V Adams.” From the Lewis and Nathan Clark Collection of Sierra Nevada Lantern Slides, UNRS-P2006-08, Special Collections and University Archives Department, University of Nevada, Reno.
By Kimberly Roberts
Sometimes a photograph captures more than the material reality contained within the image. This photograph, taken by Nathan Clark in 1931 on a Sierra Club expedition, expresses the club’s most deeply held ideals, constructing a story larger than its own making. An ice cave, silhouetted in reflected light, forms an abstract frame around three figures—Nathan’s brother Lewis, Sierra Club secretary Virginia Ferguson, and Virginia Adams, the wife of photographer Ansel Adams. The cave itself is dark, suggesting Plato’s allegory of the cave, in which reality exists only as reflected shadows on the wall. Having attained the summit, the climbers sit outside the cave, bathed in sunlight, tranquilly, reflectively, entranced by the distant horizon. This is what photograph historian Peter B. Hales calls “the naked encounter with infinity,”¹ the seemingly universal human response at high elevations to try to capture the surrounding horizon, to make sense of the enormity of the world within the framework of a camera lens. This moment of emotional transcendence expresses the purpose and meaning of mountain climbing for the Sierra Club: the search for enlightenment much like Plato’s prisoners escaping the mundane reality of the cave for the metaphysical heights.
However, unlike Plato, who believed that transcending the physical world was the way to enlightenment, the Sierra Club remained firmly grounded to materiality as that path. Philosophical transformation for them entailed hard work: “the undiluted, physical experience of nature, testing the mountaineer’s resources to the limit, had a power of refinement, drawing out the highest expression of the individual as an intelligent and moral being.”²
Like American philosopher John Dewey, who believed art was not form but experience and that emotion and insight were not something we experience outside of our senses but remain firmly grounded within them, the Sierra Club invoked experience as a means to transcendence. Much of this came from the influence of Ansel Adams who insisted that the act of attaining the image was as important as the finished photograph and must involve arduous physical activity. For him the rigors of mountain climbing represented a higher, more spiritual kind of physicality and provided the necessary path to enlightenment. Challenging the body was necessary for mental purification, resulting in a transformation that occurred not in the passive act of viewing a distant mountain but in the physical contact of confronting and ascending the rock-face itself. For Adams, this kind of action was the key element in making a photograph, a combination of spiritual vision and corporeal experience. In his 1936 book Making a Photograph, he wrote that the major difficulty in landscape photography was physically and emotionally transcending the shot, capturing the literal landscape and simultaneously creating a figurative one.³ This figurative landscape becomes art.
For Plato, physical matter, as represented by the cave walls, can have no transcendent characteristics; only by going beyond that, into pure light, can we find wisdom. However, as Gregory Fried has noted, human beings “must naturally be somewhere, grounded in a physicality and materiality and historical situatedness.”⁴ Despite the confines our physical being, which Plato yearns to escape, Fried insists that it is possible to experience the enlightenment of platonic forms. He calls this situated transcendence, “what it means to be human, embed-ded in a finite, historical understanding and also projected into what exceeds that understanding.”⁵ What exceeds is precisely the naked encounter with infinity, that moment of being very small inside a limitless horizon. This brings us back to photography, which is in fact light and shadow dancing upon a surface, like that of a cave wall, and thus to art—which carries within it the labor of its own creation.
Photo by Susan Mantle.
Kimberly Roberts grew up all over the American West, mainly in Colorado. She studied literature and history at Colorado State University and has a master’s degree in the history of photography and landscape from the University of Nevada, Reno, where she served as the university’s photograph curator for 10 years. She currently works a consultant for Nevada Humanities.