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Senior Member
Join Date: July 2005
Posts: 509
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Transcendental Beauty
Quote:
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Originally Posted by Chad
The cosmopolitan city tries to eradicate all rootedness, strip away all organic bloodlines and heritage, and leave behind a population of neutered, undifferentiated units, as if they were designed in an office, and produced in a factory.
Everything that is essential and biological, that demonstrates womanliness, is suppressed. Women are taught to diminish every characteristic that has to do with the giving and nurturing of life.
Everything in these images - flowers, leaves, grasses, trees, food - testifies to the biological cycle of which humanity is a part, and which the city tries to make the populace forget.
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Not only do modern images, set in grim cityscapes, suppress the biological, but they deny the transcendental as well.
What I find especially interesting in so many of the gorgeous pictures in this thread is that "celestial light," that emerald shade of green that looks as if all of nature is lit from within, shining with a divine light. These images really do bring to life Wordsworth's Neoplatonic idea that the transcendent is apprehensible through the Beauty of the natural world. All of this is lost in brutally modern photos with plastic-looking, spindly models shot in cold, sterile settings. But these pictures radiate that heavenly glow. It's wondrous to see.
I also love the fact that in so many of the images, the wardrobe is romantic, or folkloric, or has an Old World quality. The harmony of the beauty of the models, the settings, and the fashion is entrancing.
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