Typically, a portray in phrases is price a thousand photos. I take into consideration this an increasing number of, in our compulsively visible tradition, which more and more reduces what we predict and really feel and see — who and what we’re — to what may be photographed. I consider Susan Sontag, who referred to as it “aesthetic consumerism” half a century earlier than Instagram. In a small act of resistance, I provide The Unphotographable — a brand new weekly collection of images in phrases drawn from centuries of literature: passages transcendent and transportive, depicting landscapes and experiences radiant with magnificence and feeling that no {photograph} may convey.
One “sultry afternoon” within the final days of September in 1879, whereas traversing the American Southwest on a “lazy Authorities mule,” the Smithsonian ethnologist Frank Hamilton Cushing (July 22, 1857–April 10, 1900) discovered himself on the precipice of a black lava abyss.
On the pages of My Adventures in Zuñi, he gasps at what he noticed:
Beneath and past me was immediately revealed an amazing crimson and yellow sand-plain. It merged into lengthy stretches of grey, vague hill-lands within the western distance, distorted by mirages and sand-clouds, and overshadowed towards the north by two grand, solitary buttes of rock. From the bases of the latter to a spire-encircled, bare-faced promontory to the correct, stretched a succession of canyon-seamed, brown, sandstone mesas, which, with their mantle of piñon and cedar, fashioned a excessive, darkish boundary for your entire northern facet of the basin.
To the left, a mile or two away, crowning numberless crimson foot-hills, rose an enormous rock-mountain, a thousand ft excessive and at the very least two miles in size alongside its flat prime, which confirmed, even within the distance, fanciful chiselings by wind, sand, and climate. Past its column-sentineled western finish the low sand-basin unfold far-off to the foot-hills of the gray-and-white southern mesas, which, damaged by deep canyons, stretched, cliff after cliff, westward to the hills of the horizon.
Out from the center of the rock-wall and line of sand-hills on which I stood, via a gate of its personal opening, flowed somewhat rivulet. Rising from a succession of low mounds beneath me, it wound, like an extended whip-lash or the observe of an earth-worm, westward via the center of the sandy plain and out nearly to the horizon, the place, simply halfway between the northern buttes and the other grey mesas, it was misplaced within the southern shadows of a terraced hill.
Down behind this hill the solar was sinking, remodeling it right into a jagged pyramid of silhouette, topped with a superb halo, whence a seeming midnight aurora burst forth via damaged clouds, bordering every misty blue island with crimson and gold, then blazing upward in widening traces of sunshine, as if to repeat within the excessive heavens its earthly splendor.