Devils in the Detail?

 

This is Tehran. You're looking north, I think. Those are the Elburz/Alborz, peaking at about 12,000 feet. The photo comes from the site tehran24.com. I watched their site for several years, because they'd post really good photos of Tehran street life - kids, young professionals, clerics, taxi drivers, old people. Traffic. Seasons. Neighborhood stores. Life outside the city - Damavand, the Caspian coast, Isfahan. Then the posts weren't as frequent, and now it's rare to see new ones.

This is a beautiful picture, though, isn't it? It doesn't tell us much about what's going on at the street - and cultural and linguistic - level of the people who live there, but it shows us the relative magnitudes of the human built environment (the human trace) and that of the mountain behind it, for instance. It tells us about the building habits of the people there. It tells us about the climate.

It doesn't capture every level of detail - as those are infinite - but that's why it's beautiful: the horizon of its detail is just 'above' the human organism, at the level of the human trace. The picture mostly reveals what is beyond human buildings, human traces that are, from this perspective, indistinguishable from those of other animals, like the termite's mound, the wasp's nest, the bird's nest, the beaver's dam and lodge.

Leibniz said that nature is infinitely articulated, meaning there's no end to the depth of detail of the world. The deeper you look, the more detail you find. That's why there really is no end to the world. But there are horizons in every direction. Those horizons can fool us into thinking there's nothing beyond them. We can forget it as a horizon, and not even have a name for it, and thereby lose the ability to even cognize it. That's the spell we're under, a spell woven even more tightly in a photograph, where horizon and detail are expressly and complicatedly manipulated for specific effects.

Now think just how many photographs we look at in a day. After day.