In Defence of Sunsets
21 March 2010
I have had to rethink my position on sunsets. I know that sounds ridiculous - sunsets are after all a naturally occurring phenomenon, happening frequently, mostly every night, in fact. However living at my hide-away in the Scottish Highlands I’ve been subjected to some of the most awe inspiring god-and-his-angels-are-about-to-descend solar events that man, since the dawn of time, may have witnessed.
There have been sunsets clothed in silver mist; sunsets that announce the end of the world in apocalyptic explosion; sunsets like bloody wounds; sunsets that turn the surrounding mountains into the soft contours of a human body; sunsets on a loch that has become a mirror and disorientates all sense of what is image and what is reflection; sunsets that illuminate whispy clouds for thousands of miles as if an artists had dragged a feathered brush across the sky. I could go on, the main problem is that there are also sunsets that just look like your typical kitschy shortbread tin/postcard image of a “Scottish Sunset.” And so my usual Po-Mo self-conscious cynicism descends to blot out the view.
I blame cultural studies and the Marxist critique of bourgeois society for stealing the joy of sunsets from me. I was heavily schooled in all this in the 90’s and so a sunset became a symbol of the false consciousness of the tourist/colonialist; or of the selfish transcendent western ego . Sunsets from this perspective are also dangerous because they are kitsch, and kitsch it used by nationalists and national socialists to prop up ideals of belonging, identity and pride. Sunsets are also the suspicious staple of most religions, and are the only visual image we have of ‘the heavens’. Sunsets are also romantic – two lovers before a sunset is so trite I even gag as I write it. Sunsets are fascist, sunsets are corny. They have been done to death.
Yet, I sit here, looking out at yet another epic display of orange and gold over the sharp black mountains and I could almost weep over how many words and ideologies stand between me and my sunset. Have I become so sophisticated, so sceptical and jaded that the appreciation of a simple natural event cannot be grasped without footnotes and disclaimers?
Some of the other residents here are struggling with the same problem. We stand here at night, outside, sharing wine and fresh air and chat and another sunset arrives and we all turn and watch.
You got a camera?
Nah, I stopped that a few weeks back, people would laugh if they knew I’d been photographing them.
Yeah, I know. Crap isn’t it.
And so we let the sun set as if it were an embarrassment.
I have even heard it said by cultural theorists that ‘sunsets started in the 19th century’. Absurd, if taken literally, given the billions of years sunsets have been hanging around. What they meant was that it wasn’t till Romanticism, the concept of The Sublime and the growth of nature tourism, the paintings of Turner and Friedrich etc that sunsets became something that people paid much attention to. Consider the medieval serf; did he wax lyrical about sunsets, no - he worried about his eking enough sustenance from his plot of mud for one more meal. Indeed, this all may be true, but goddamn it, I’ve only got another seven days of epic sunsets left before I have to head back to the city, and kitsch as they are and kitsch as I may become, I’m going to photograph every one of them.
1 comment
Written by SaraB on 25 March 2010 at 10:26:00
Real life sunsets are not kitsch, they are truly awesome. Looking at other people's photos of sunsets however is utterly tedious. So please, enjoy your sunsets and capture the memory but don't try and share it with anyone else. It will just look crap :-)