Richard Quinney, A Sense Sublime. Borderland Books, Madison, 2013, 169 pages, 60 B/W photos, $25.00 paper. ISBN 978-0-9835174-4-3.

I read Richard Quinney’s recent book of photographs and essays, A Sense Sublime, over the course of a long train journey across southern England. With its format of small black-and-white photographs of rural Illinois accompanied by oblique captions extracted from the work of well-known poets and philosophers, it is a comfortable companion for such a journey. Yet, there is something confounding in this work too.

Quinney is a sociologist by profession and he is known for his academic writings as well as several books of autobiographical memoirs, which focus on his life in Illinois and Wisconsin. In this work, Quinney presents a series of photographs and short descriptive essays, or “field notes”, recording his life between 1983 and 2001 when he lived in the town of DeKalb in northern Illinois.  Through this combination of photograph and text, Quinney invites the reader on a journey through his hometown and familiar landscapes at the end of the twentieth century. This is a very personal story. As Quinney explains in his introduction, during 18 years he lived in DeKalb, he underwent a number of major life changes including treatment for chronic leukaemia; retirement from his university post at Northern Illinois University; the death of his mother; the end of one marriage and the beginning of another; becoming a grandfather, and, finally leaving for Wisconsin. The work, perhaps unsurprisingly given such personal experiences, is animated by a self-consciously spiritual tone. Quinney’s camera and field notes are thus used in his determination to seek out a transcendental sense of beauty, to experience, as Quinney puts it, “the sublime in everyday life” (page 7). In his quest, Quinney acknowledges his debt to a long tradition of transcendental writers, Romantic poets and landscape painters, many of whose work he quotes as ‘epigraphs’ for his photographs.

Quinney’s notion of “the sublime” is rather far removed from Edmund Burke’s original notion of the terror and danger that encounters with the natural world could evoke in humans. Quinney’s work is much more pastoral and picturesque in tone, as he ventures out with his camera—a lonely Romantic seeker after solace and melancholy pleasure in the changing pastoral scene. The photographs, with their soft mellow grey tones, owe much to the genre of pastoral landscape imagery. Scenes of weathered houses, ruined and abandoned farm buildings, local cemeteries, railway tracks, and snow-covered fields, are framed by Quinney’s simple titles: ‘Tree Grove in Cornfield’; ‘Willow Branches at the Lagoon in Winter’; ‘Farm in Ruins on Cherry Valley Road’; ‘Saint Mary’s Cemetery on County Line Road’. The views are direct and selected with care by someone who obviously knows and loves seeing these places as they change through the seasons and over the years.  In contrast to the direct, descriptive titles, the captions are deliberately expansive and opaque. They are borrowed from the work of well-known poets, philosophers, writers, theologians and photographers ranging from Willie Nelson to William Shakespeare. Using these extracts of poetic text as ‘epigraphs’, Quinney gives the reader perhaps too obvious signposts to how he uses photography as a kind of transcendental meditation in his everyday spiritual practice. Even without the epigraphs, the themes of mortality, ruin, decay and transcendence run in and across the work.

Quinney’s photography seems curiously old fashioned in its adherence to a particular, picturesque aesthetic, most obvious in his choice of black and white photography and his selection of empty, decaying landscapes. Any doubt as to where Quinney looks for his photographic practice are dispelled as he names and quotes masters of the modernist photographic canon: Joseph Steiglitz; Harry Callahan; Joseph Sudek; Walker Evans. This mid-twentieth century modern style suits Quinney’s project perfectly, as it is animated by the notion that photography, in the right hands, expresses the artist’s singular poetic vision.  This is also why, apart from Quinney’s own presence, which makes a shadowy appearance once or twice, there are no fellow human beings in these photographs. This may seem a strange omission, particularly by a sociologist and Quinney is keen to point out in his preface that the absence of human beings “does not signal a lack of human interest or concern. To the contrary, the landscapes I saw and preserved on film are filled with recognition of the human condition” (page 7).  However, the absence of humans does betray a wider self-absorption evident in Quinney’s work. Landscape photographs are viewed as external projections of an inner sensibility, rather than a record of collective social experience or cultural life. In general this lends the work a sense of poetic harmony, but in places it is frustrating. A photograph of a massive limestone quarry, for example, is accompanied by an epigraph from the Bhagavad Gita on the unchanging reality pervading the universe (pages 44-45), when a short description of the history and geography of this place would have been far more enlightening.

The last third of the book is taken up with a series of ‘Field notes’, written at the time the photographs were made. Since many of these bite-size notes relate to particular photographs, it is a shame that they were not placed separately with each photograph rather than mashed together in this way. The consequence is that there is much repetition of philosophical themes and ideas. Although the scene may change, the sentiment remains the same. Here is a flavour:

“Photographing the landscape, I have discovered the importance of watching all things as they rise and pass away, of seeing things as they really are. Experiencing the landscape in silence, with their attention, I become aware of the absolute nothingness of the world, of the reality beyond words. Everything of which I am part is immeasurable and mysterious” (page 150).

Curiously, towards the end of the book, Quinney strikes a more engaged tone, reflecting on how the local and global are connected, noting that as well as being an observer and photographer he has been a “participant in one community or another, a philosopher of everyday life, and a householder”, as well as expressing his desire for “knowledge as a practical social skill rather than an intellectual enterprise” (page 182). Yet, Quinney’s dedication to a formalist photographic practice in which photography is used to express some inner spiritual truth means that he passes up the opportunity to convey what it is that makes DeKalb and its hinterland feel like home. The work has neither the poetic complexity to rival illustrated fictional works like W. G. Sebald’s Rings of Saturn (1995) nor the political engagement that characterises classic photobooks like John Berger and Jean Mohr’s A Fortunate Man (1967). In the end, A Sense Sublime, though pleasant in its pastoral scenes and generic quotes of wisdom, is a frustrating work because it fails to choreograph words and pictures in a way that can adequately convey the richness of its author’s undoubted love for this place he called home.