More heart-stoppers

Another set of images from the cache of 4x5 internegs, recently scanned into Timm's growing digital archives. As I said before, Timm may have been culling these photos for use in a coffee table book he was conceiving. Such projects require really big pictures, the best of the best. If these images were intended for that use, Timm saw these as his best work, at least from those images he took of natural settings.

I hope no one's offended that I call 'em heart-stoppers, given Timm's fate. I think it was James Joyce who wrote about the experience of art as aesthetic arrest. This from Joyce's first novel "A Portrait of The Artist as a Young Man":

This supreme quality is felt by the artist when the esthetic image is first conceived in his imagination. The mind in that mysterious instant Shelley likened beautifully to a fading coal. The instant wherein that supreme quality of beauty, the clear radiance of the esthetic image, is apprehended luminously by the mind which has been arrested by its wholeness and fascinated by its harmony is the luminous silent stasis of esthetic pleasure, a spiritual state very like to that cardiac condition which the Italian physiologist Luigi Galvani, using a phrase almost as beautiful as Shelley's, called the enchantment of the heart.

In one of his lectures on Joyce, Joeseph Campbell said, "The aesthetic experience is a simple beholding of the object ... you experience a radiance. You are held in aesthetic arrest."

Enchantment of the heart: beauty stills us in the rapture of radiance, erasing the boundaries of time and space, suspending us in a moment which seems eternal. Beauty allows us to reenter the womb, reunited with the maternals of God and nature. We are one, we are whole, we are healed. At least, that's the high end of the experience, when we give beauty our full and rapt and loyal attention. I

think that's what Timm was aiming for in these pictures, creating moments of eternity using images from this world. Sadly it was a work Timm could not complete, but judging from the images here, I'd say he was getting close. And that is the condition of every artist: of getting close and closer to the heart of the matter.