Whether conscious or unconscious, the
historical religious significance of such
a sight is overwhelming--the mountain
surrounded by water and piercing the
clouds is a universal paradisiacal image--
and yet for this very reason, to our well-
tutored eye, the image can also be read as a
familiar effect of enculturation.
fact, it is along the horizon line of these two
modes of perception that his images send
our spirit flying.
less traveled near Lake Taupo in the central
North Island of New Zealand--for those
in the know, site of a massive eruption in
180 ce, recorded to have turned the sky red
over China and Rome. All memory of such
a cataclysmic past is absent in this beatific
image. Sweeney says that he instantly
recognized the image he wanted. He had
his own road to Damascus experience. He
stopped the car and took this single shot:
light diffused through foreground trees,
nimbus backed up over intervening hills
. . . The shine and dip of tarmac curving
elegiacally from sight, entering darkness
before any promise of ascent . . .
what we also know is just a mundane
stretch of road, we recognize its precedents
in the documentary vision of American
Weston (New Mexico Highway, 1937),
Dorothea Lange (The Road West, 1938), or
Robert Frank (US 285, New Mexico, 1955).
Not a lonely country road at all, Sweeney's
road turns out to be well traveled. And
so, once again, not simply a spontaneous
epiphany in the landscape, but a complicity
of nature and culture, a charge of insight
along the horizon line of the purportedly
sacred and the allegedly temporal.
series of spontaneous visual prayers, can
simultaneously be viewed as meditations
on the history of art and photography--
the Renaissance Assumptions and
Transfigurations; the iconic puffed
clouds of Magritte; the 1960s and 1970s
cloudscapes of Georgia O'Keeffe (like
Sweeney, mesmerized by views from
airplane windows). Or Edward Weston's
photographs of towering and striated
Mexican clouds from the mid-1920s; Alfred
Steiglitz's aerial views in his Equivalent
series of photos from the 1920s and 1930s;
Ansell Adams, Minor White, Ralph Steiner
. . . the cloud chasers followed by Sweeney
goes on. And his other-worldly view of
nature is revealed--and is revealing--as
self-consciously worldly.
commune with nature, Sweeney continues
to find in manufactured landscapes
and urban environments many of the
man--trees and lights, changing seasons,
views from high, views looking up. For
Sweeney, the city is second nature--and
as such his images here, to the very extent
that they are commonplace, have the
same revelatory effect as his scenes along
backcountry roads or distant flight-paths.
banal, incidental, or incomplete. A simple
lamp in a hotel room; a chandelier in City
Hall, New York, glimpsed from the street
outside; a Philippe Starck lightwork in
Paris' Baccarat Museum of Crystal. These
three photos of fragments from bigger
pictures--scraps from various excursions,
but linked in his consciousness by a
comparable glow--all communicate the
religious insight of God shedding light to
the world. Three modest infinities ripped
out of time.
a fecundity, a sheer paradise. For Sweeney,
New York itself is a paradise, insofar as
it allows him to enter into the spirit of
photographers like Steiglitz, Steichen, or
Kertesz who made the pilgrimage before
him and like him made the city their home.
Sweeney himself lives above Madison
Square Park across from the Flatiron
Building, and Edward Steichen's iconic
1904 photograph powerfully haunts his
own perception of the landmark.
invokes in us the corporeality of seeing
itself: the blur of motion, the play of light
or streak of moisture on a window, the hint
of the means of travel that sweeps the eye
through the world.
the differences in his worldview from the
nature lovers and Transcendentalists who
have passed before him. So, in his triptych
of images from Britain's Lake District,
we don't see any tranquil, Wordsworthian
view of rolling fields, glistening water, or
stone fences.
could be anywhere, but which nevertheless
communicate the singular and exhilarating
sense of an eye on the move, transported
by the scene as much as it is transported
through the scene.
paintings, but are actually the runway
at speed at La Guardia Airport, inspirit
a sense of timelessness in the very blur
of time passing. (For the traditional
Transcendentalists, infinity is best
approached on foot. But for Sweeney,
a Concord Transcendentalist in my
misguided sense, infinity can also be
grasped at speed.)
physical world. When I look at his photos,
band of clouds on the horizon were a
portent of landfall and a new world.
mystical traditions clouds express the
unknowable nature of the divine (for
example, The Cloud of Unknowing, a
medieval work of Christian mysticism).
has a religious drift to it. When the clouds
part, we glimpse the light. Veiling God, too
terrible for human eye, the cloud already
symbolizes the presence of God.
gods; and in Egypt of the creation deity.
Later, as Jacqueline Taylor Basker outlines
in her fascinating essay "The Cloud as
Symbol: Destruction or Dialogue":
image of the cloud for Yahweh. As
an aniconic people, who could not
use a tangible material image to rep-
resent their god, the cloud provided
a convenient insubstantial object to
use as a visible symbol. During the
wanderings of the Jews in the des-
ert, the cloud hovers over or in the
`tent of witness' and plays a sym-
bolic role as a recurrent theophany
(an appearance of the Divine) in
Old Testament scripture to witness
the presence of God.
underlying the divine nature of Christ, as
we see in the Transfiguration described in
the Gospel of Matthew (17:5):
cloud enveloped them, and a voice
from the cloud said, `This is my
Son, whom I love; with him I am
well pleased. Listen to him!'
can recall religious ideas about the eye of
God or clouds of glory, while also evoking
secular notions of castles in the sky--or,
in opposite mood, mushroom clouds and
nuclear destruction.
religious myth, water precedes creation. We
sense this in Sweeney's spectacular series of
horizon photos taken from Raumati where
he sometimes lives on the lower West Coast
of New Zealand's North Island. In these
images, where water meets sky in changing
light, it is as if the void takes shape--a
creation myth enacted for his lens. For
Sweeney, who grew up Roman Catholic,
the first verses of Genesis would surely
have inspired his vision:
heaven and the earth. And the earth
was without form, and void; and
deep. And the Spirit of God moved
upon the face of the waters. And
God said, `Let there be light': and
there was light. And God saw the
light, that it was good: and God di-
vided the light from the darkness.
emerges out of water and ultimately
dissolves back into it, purified and
washed clean. As Eliade says, water is
the "reservoir of all the possibilities of
existence." Likewise, the horizon line
opens us up to unlimited possibility,
releasing us from life as it has taken shape
around us and into the infinite beyond.
"The health of the eye," wrote Emerson,
"seems to demand a horizon. We are never
tired, so long as we can see far enough."
in particular how this view from Raumati
used to excite his wonder about what
might lie ahead for him--a virtuality that
became actual when he left these islands
surrounded by water to reimagine himself
on the island of Manhattan.
land that called him forth. New York in
particular is the symbolic and storied center
of the world, especially compared to New
Zealand geographically and by association
culturally on the edge of the world. But
necessarily coterminous for religious man,
the center and the edge fold over each other
for Sweeney. Hence, in his photography, he
brings together nature--symbolized by the
New Zealand landscape--and culture--
symbolized by New York.
centrality or sacrality. Culture, on the
other hand, is man-made, temporal, and
by comparison regarded as peripheral. So,
already in Sweeney's work there is a certain
displacement if not inversion between
the idea of New Zealand and New York.
According to this reading New Zealand
would be a natural paradise and central
while New York, teeming and distracted,
would be far flung and on the edge.
polar world views artfully turned upside-
down--his framing of nature is determined
by both the history of religion and of art
(and in this way are mediated or unnatural;
while his urban views, equally mediated by
art history, are presented as natural pieces
of infinity.
incomparable natural splendor. As Sweeney
says in conversation, "If mountains were
show business this would be Broadway."
At the same time, we can't help but be
aware of its "chocolate box" vista--a view
a million other travelers have snapped in