Paradise Road Full Book Page 73

passing as they seek to eff its ineffability.
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.

In Sweeney's images, then, the sacred

and the profane are in studied tension. In
fact, it is along the horizon line of these two
modes of perception that his images send
our spirit flying.

Again we experience something like this

in his photo Road. This was taken on a road
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 . . .

At the same time as we appreciate the

hallowed features of this journey along
what we also know is just a mundane
stretch of road, we recognize its precedents
in the documentary vision of American

roads by photographers such as Edward
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.

Again, Sweeney's cloud photos,

which on the face of it seem to be a
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.

Whereas the Transcendentalists

needed to escape from towns and cities to
commune with nature, Sweeney continues
to find in manufactured landscapes
and urban environments many of the

classic symbols and attitudes of religious
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.

Sweeney sees the light in things that

someone else might regard as obscure,
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.

Each impression or passing moment,

each lived experience relived through art is
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.

Just as we feel the presence and spirit of

others in his photographs, Sweeney often
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.

This at the same time as he playfully

acknowledges both the similarities and
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.

Instead, we catch a blurry view from

a moving car of straggly roadsides that
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.

Likewise, the diptych of photos

that look like abstract expressionist
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.)

For Sweeney, vision itself is a miracle

given off by the rub of embodied eye and
physical world. When I look at his photos,