The New Yorker & Me: Acts of Seeing: Burnt Bridge Piles

Introduction

What is The New Yorker? I know it’s a great magazine and that it’s a tremendous source of pleasure in my life. But what exactly is it? This blog’s premise is that The New Yorker is a work of art, as worthy of comment and analysis as, say, Keats’s “Ode on a Grecian Urn.” Each week I review one or more aspects of the magazine’s latest issue. I suppose it’s possible to describe and analyze an entire issue, but I prefer to keep my reviews brief, and so I usually focus on just one or two pieces, to explore in each the signature style of its author. A piece by Nick Paumgarten is not like a piece by Jill Lepore, and neither is like a piece by Ian Frazier. One could not mistake Collins for Seabrook, or Bilger for Goldfield, or Mogelson for Kolbert. Each has found a style, and it is that style that I respond to as I read, and want to understand and describe.

Monday, October 17, 2022

Acts of Seeing: Burnt Bridge Piles

Inkerman Lake, 2022 (Photo by John MacDougall)

In this series, I look at some of my own photos and try to determine their governing aesthetic.

I begin with a picture I took on a recent trip to New Brunswick’s beautiful Acadian Peninsula. It shows a line of charred posts – all that is left of the wooden walking bridge that used to cross Inkerman Lake. The morning light illuminates the burnt piles perfectly. That’s one aspect of the scene that appealed to me – the golden autumnal light on the blackened posts. Another is the way the piles follow one another in a gradual fade toward the opposite shore. I love that receding perspective. Ruskin did, too. In his great The Elements of Drawing (1857), he said,

Another important and pleasurable way of expressing unity is by giving some orderly succession to a number of objects more or less similar. And this succession is most interesting when it is connected with some gradual change in the aspect or character of the objects. Thus the succession of the pillars of a cathedral aisle is most interesting when they retire in perspective, becoming more and more obscure in the distance: so the succession of mountain promontories one behind another, on the flanks of the valley; so the succession of clouds, fading farther and farther towards the horizon; each promontory and each cloud being of different shape, yet all evidently following in a calm and appointed order.