Jasmine Rossi: Sublime

Jasmine Rossi: Sublime

Nature photography is a photographic mode that inevitably changes the photographer. At the very least, photographers develop an appreciation for the beauty of the natural world; at the very best, they develop an ethical concern for its integrity. Jasmine Rossi: Sublime is a series of photographs that bear an exquisite pictorial quality that only hints at the harsh conditions under which they were realized. Indeed, some of these images were captured under blizzard conditions and freezing temperatures so extreme that they deter all but the most resilient photographers. Yet, they deliver to the viewer placid albeit at times unsettling and even daunting landscapes in which trees stand as what Mircea Eliade called "axis mundi." Their roots descend towards the underworld, the trunks erect on earth, and their branches grow towards the luminous sky. For believers in religious experiences, trees establish a physical and spiritual axis between the three cosmic zones; for scientists, they are the producers, the starting points of life cycles.[1]

Although colloquially the adjective "sublime" is usually adjudicated to something subtle, enticing and beautiful, in art jargon the term is often taken —correctly or incorrectly— from Immanuel Kant’s Critique of Judgment (1790), where the sublime is an experience different from the beautiful; namely, one of awe, majesty, and/or sometimes terror triggered by overwhelming natural phenomena such as thunderstorms, colossal waves, or unscalable mountain peaks.[2] The sublime experience is not a quality intrinsic to the object but one that occurs in the mind of the observer. In Kant-speak, the sublime experience comes about when an object such as an abyss or a tornado makes us realize that our rational understanding of the menacing phenomenon is superior to nature itself. Nowadays, of course, we tend to hold nature in higher esteem, and rationality with a greater degree of self-criticism, precisely because we have rationally understood that we ought to. Rossi's bigger project as a nature photographer walks a thin line along mysticism and rationality, between beautiful and sublime, between contemplation and danger. Her work displays painterly elegance as well as stark realism.

As ghostly apparitions on the stage of rugged landscapes in China, Patagonia or East Texas, trees establish themselves as central figures in the photographs of Sublime. They lead the viewer to ask about their almost incredible endurance in the dry desert, in the steep slopes of mountains, or in flooded swamps. It is a survival that defies rational expectations and hence tempts us to experience the phenomenon as sublime, and even "spiritual" —perhaps not in the Hare Krishna sense, nor even in the German sense of "Geist" in "Zeitgeist", but as an experience similar to that of perceiving the world under the influence of mescaline or other psychotropic substance. Our connection with nature and the universe is enhanced and intensified. As Aldous Huxley struggled to describe in The Doors of Perception (1954), it is not an experience of bizarre hallucinations, but rather, one of profound interconnectedness with surroundings that become sharply luminous and alive.[3]