Aesthetics Of Aging Essay -- Age Aging Visual

An Aesthetics Of Aging Recall, reader if ever in the mountains a mist has caught you, through which you could not see except as moles do through skin †¦ Dante, Comedy1 ARGUMENT: THE RELEASE FROM THE BODILY EGO Many recent studies on visual culture highlight the representation of the body in photography as a signifier of social constructions. Photography however has always played an important part in the construction of the subject, a perspective that I suggest in what follows, one that combines analytical concepts with aspects of the phenomenology of perception, indispensable for the understanding of art works and of our relation to them. By contrast with the overexposure of the body in commercial photography, photographers in the art field today represent the body as a visual metaphor for configurations of interiority engaged in subject construction. Their insistence on formal aspects (of composition and technique) displaces the focus from the physical to the psychic body so as to â€Å"capture† unstable phenomena of change, of conflict in the subject’s relation to time. In Joyce Tenneson’s photographs ordinary referents are obliterated to liberate space for other dimensions * This paper is an abridged and adapted version of a chapter in an unpublished manuscript devoted to photography, aging, and subject construction, entitled Touching Surfaces: Photography and the Fabric of the Subject, in Time 1 This Dante fragment coming from Charles Singleton’s prose version of the Comedy seems to me evocative of the  « misty  » visual effect in Tenneson’s photographs, and also of her placing the lens of the camera much like a mole through the skin, to look at the human body from an interstice, as it were, between the inside... ... Collector’s Photography Magazine. June, 1987. FREUD, Sigmund. The Ego and the Id. The Standard Edition London: Hogarth Press & The Institute od Psychoanalysis, 1953-1974, vol. XIX. GLISSANT, Edouard. Poà ©tique de la relation. Poà ©tique III. Paris: Gallimard, 1990. GOLDBERG, Vicki. â€Å"Unwritten Myths.† Preface to Transformations. MERRILL, James. â€Å"Divine Poem,† in Recitative. Prose by James Merrill. San Francisco: North Point Press, 1986. RICHIR, Marc. Le Corps. Essai sur l’intà ©riorità ©. Paris: Hatier, 1993. WINNICOTT, D.W. â€Å"Ego Distortion in Terms of True and False Self,† (1960). The Maturational Process and Facilitating Environment: Studies in the Theory of Emotional Development. London: Hogarth Press & The Insititute of Psychoanalysis, 1965. WOLLHEIM, Richard. â€Å"The Bodily Ego,† The Mind and Its Depths. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Univeristy Press, 1993. 10 11 Aesthetics Of Aging Essay -- Age Aging Visual An Aesthetics Of Aging Recall, reader if ever in the mountains a mist has caught you, through which you could not see except as moles do through skin †¦ Dante, Comedy1 ARGUMENT: THE RELEASE FROM THE BODILY EGO Many recent studies on visual culture highlight the representation of the body in photography as a signifier of social constructions. Photography however has always played an important part in the construction of the subject, a perspective that I suggest in what follows, one that combines analytical concepts with aspects of the phenomenology of perception, indispensable for the understanding of art works and of our relation to them. By contrast with the overexposure of the body in commercial photography, photographers in the art field today represent the body as a visual metaphor for configurations of interiority engaged in subject construction. Their insistence on formal aspects (of composition and technique) displaces the focus from the physical to the psychic body so as to â€Å"capture† unstable phenomena of change, of conflict in the subject’s relation to time. In Joyce Tenneson’s photographs ordinary referents are obliterated to liberate space for other dimensions * This paper is an abridged and adapted version of a chapter in an unpublished manuscript devoted to photography, aging, and subject construction, entitled Touching Surfaces: Photography and the Fabric of the Subject, in Time 1 This Dante fragment coming from Charles Singleton’s prose version of the Comedy seems to me evocative of the  « misty  » visual effect in Tenneson’s photographs, and also of her placing the lens of the camera much like a mole through the skin, to look at the human body from an interstice, as it were, between the inside... ... Collector’s Photography Magazine. June, 1987. FREUD, Sigmund. The Ego and the Id. The Standard Edition London: Hogarth Press & The Institute od Psychoanalysis, 1953-1974, vol. XIX. GLISSANT, Edouard. Poà ©tique de la relation. Poà ©tique III. Paris: Gallimard, 1990. GOLDBERG, Vicki. â€Å"Unwritten Myths.† Preface to Transformations. MERRILL, James. â€Å"Divine Poem,† in Recitative. Prose by James Merrill. San Francisco: North Point Press, 1986. RICHIR, Marc. Le Corps. Essai sur l’intà ©riorità ©. Paris: Hatier, 1993. WINNICOTT, D.W. â€Å"Ego Distortion in Terms of True and False Self,† (1960). The Maturational Process and Facilitating Environment: Studies in the Theory of Emotional Development. London: Hogarth Press & The Insititute of Psychoanalysis, 1965. WOLLHEIM, Richard. â€Å"The Bodily Ego,† The Mind and Its Depths. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Univeristy Press, 1993. 10 11