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.

Ruskin's Rehabilitation

John Ruskin, Self-portrait, in Blue Neckcloth (1873)

Anthony Lane, in his “Art For Love’s Sake” (The New Yorker, August 14, 2000; included in his excellent 2002 collection Nobody’s Perfect), asks, “Which is worse: to be Humbert Humbert who seduces an underage female, with or without her consent, but who at least comprehends what he has done; or to be a John Ruskin, who is guilty of no rape or ravishment, but who hardly begins to know his own depravity?” Lane’s judgment of Ruskin’s infatuation with girls has always struck me as unduly harsh. Recently, I was pleased to see Garry Wills express an alternative view. In his absorbing “Ruskin: The Great Artist Emerges” (The New York Review of Books, April 3, 2014), Wills writes,

It is true that Ruskin’s heated religious upbringing made him inhibited and guilty about sex. It is also true that he had the Victorian desire to see women as angels, and to focus on little girls as more angelic than others – a trait shared by American Victorians like Henry Adams and Mark Twain. This form of nympholepsy did not make these men pedophiles. Rose was Ruskin’s Beatrice or Laura, not his preyed-upon Lolita.

Does it matter if John Ruskin was a pervert? It matters to me. I relish his writing. I want to be able to enjoy it without the guilt that I’m enjoying the work of a pedophile.