The Metaphysics of Photography

This question of ecological certainty, patriotism, or the egotistical aggrandizement connoted by the manufacture of images involves conundrums of psychology, of speculative realism, panoramic endemism, picturesque escapism, those postcards and billboards, the rational and irrational, potential and actual, underlying principles of identity, integrity, and place. Ultimately, the landscapes of mind, those myriad, wistful losses of physical identity into the greater miasma of an aesthetic swamp that is the photograph, leave us ecologically stymied. There could be no stranger paradox than that of a landscape photograph. Judgments are not part of the aesthetic questions.