I initially looked into the related terms of Genus Loci, images which looked or felt “ghostly”,  the term melancholy specifically related to the landscape and ideas and images which referenced the past and history. But, or course, feelings of melancholy are also firmly joined with grief and loss and trying to find a way to capture photographically that which has been lost. As such, melancholy is a theme very close to my Photography 3 work.

I use as the starting point for this work my thoughts I recorded in the Lanbscape unit. I will add and shape these thoughts for my new unit. (Dalgleish, 2021)

My landscape tutor had given me feedback and asking for my rationale for use of specific techniques and that my use of some of these terms I had used were incorrect and even contradictory. I thought about what was said and decided to look further into this idea of melancholy which is perhaps a more coherent way of trying to express the meaning behind some of my choices in my work. I also wonder if melancholy describes the mood and tone of how the subject might be chosen and presented but also whether this reflects the tone and mood of the photographer?

In her book, Melancholy and the Landscape, Jacky Bowring describes Melancholy as having two definitions. “Melancholy has two dinstinct poles, the scientific and the poetic” (Bowring, 2017)

I think there is a great crossover with my Photograph 3 project. The cold science of medical scans being based in the world of physics yet how art comes into this and how our very humanity can be expressed in an attempt to push back that harsh, technical, medical science. The scietific and the poetic could also be expressed as the mechanical and the emotional.

The terms scientific and poetic which Bowring uses, I think are chosen and used in what seems a modern way. Reading her book, melancholy has appeared many times with different contexts. At times, the term was associated with the planet Saturn, with Satan, witch trials, mood swings, physical and mental health problems, drug use, hallucinations or delusions and the balance of the four humours; namely phlegm, blood, yellow and black bile. (Bowring, 2017) (Ruston, 2014)  It appears that the idea of melancholy seemed to be thought of as part medical, part mental and part evil. It was not fully understood in any scientific manner involving experiementation or testing which would explain the wide range of theories surrounding the term.

In artistic terms, melancholy was used by artists of the romantic era and was very much connected with the ideas of the picturesque and of the sublime. Bowring describes how artists such as Wordsworth and Baudelaire used the term melancholy in their works. (Bowring, 2017)  Lecturer in English Literature, Dr Stephanie Forward writes about the Romantics telling us that art for the Romantics was heavily related to the concept of the sublime and the feelings experienced in the presence of awe inspiring landscapes or in extreme situations. (Forward, 2014)  This idea of the sublime when applied to the landscape shifts the idea of melancholy some distance from how I imagine my project looking at the medical scan. However, in one way, there is a close correllation. That of drug use for artistic purposes and drug use for medical need.

I wonder if part of this idea of experiencing the expreme, was drug induced? Many artists since then have used drugs as part of their artistic practice and experience. Artists such as Shelly, Keats, Byron who were known to be regular drug users. Drug use in their time was commonplace and not illegal  (Ruston, 2014). As an aside, when my daughter was ill and heaviliy dosed up on a cocktail of drugs, she worried that she would “get high”. Her doctors re-assured her that when the body in great pain, the euphoric side of drugs doesn’t always come to the fore. In some way, it as if the need to alleviate the pain changes how the body absorbs and uses such drugs.

Perhaps this drug use was part of reason behind the idea of melancholy. It appears that the drug use itself might have created feelings of depression and paranoia. Drug use helped with freeing minds for artistic creativity but at same time had impacts in different directions. Depression and despair and extreme grief are things which again seem to link the idea of melancholy with my Photography 3 project.

A drug in common use at the time of the romantics was opium which would produce symptoms of euphoria, drowsiness, constipation, nausea, and addiction. Cocaine was in use for around 2,000 years but I didn’t find a source which said if the romantics used this or a similar drug, however, the symptoms of cocaine use including agitation, paranoia, hallucinations, delusions, violence, as well as suicidal and homicidal thinking (Morton, 1999)  would appear to match very closely with some of the descriptions of melancholy and of the moods expressed by romantic artists in their works.

I read an interview  with Jean-Jacques Burnell of the rock band The Stranglers who spoke about heroin use as a creative choice. “The heroin added to the paranoia… we carried on for a while and it was quite pleasurable. But it’s like The Lord of the Rings, where every time you put the ring on, it gives you an advantage but it also takes away a bit of your soul. Heroin is similar, You have this excess of physical energy, but it takes away your soul more and more until it kills you.” (Ryan, 2021)

In the paper Melancholy Experience in Literature of the Long Eighteenth Century, Ingram states that melancholy is closely related to depression but also uses terms such as the spleen and the vapours when describing depression (Ingram et al., 2011, p2)

This re-enforces my idea that melancholy was not properly understood. There are clear differences between how this condition was thought about before the beginnings of any scientific understanding. To this day, depression is not fully understood with potential causes ranging from genetic, to drug use, to diet related to severe mental episodes. (Bruce, 2021)

Interestingly  is that the state of melancholy became a recurrent theme in the art of that time (Ingram et al., 2011)

Lawlor writes that melancholy became a fashionable disease and quotes an argument from a Swiss physician of the time who argued that “fashionable people are subject to fashionable diseases because of their modern, ‘civilised’ lifestyle” (Lawlor, 2011, p46) Am sure that for many today with a better understanding of depression, might smile at such a description. Lawlor goes on to point out that artists “sought to appropriate the possibilties of melancholy as a means of authenticating creative abilities” (Lawlor, 2011)

It is interesting to me that my work hinted at images with a “ghostly” appearance which might be something which artists of the time of which Lawlor writes might have decribed as a melancholic idea. A quick search for artists who were interested in melancholy throws up artists of that romantic time such as Blake or Wordswoth or Lord Byron or Keats. Interesting to me as I wouldn’t have considered myself a fan of their works nor would I have intentionally looked to copy elements of what they had created.

Bowring speaks of “The paradox of a beauty founded in sorrow, a loss of love, of longing, melancholy’s gift to aesthetics” (Bowring, 2017, p18) and also writes about melancholy being marginalised and overshadowed by conventions of the sublime, the beautiful and the picturesque. She is speaking specifically of architecture but her words resonate to a much wider range than just architecture.

This idea of a paradox seems very powerful to me as I work through medical imagining and at same time the sense of loss within myself.

This idea of sorrow and longing is something which I think is very closely tied with our views of the past. The term “rose-tinted spectacles” comes to mind when we talk of how much better things were in the past while forgetting about the negative aspects such as prevalence of disease and high infant mortality. Bowring, being interested in architecture, speaks of the places associated with melancholy; post-industrial landscapes, memorials and ruins (Bowring, 2017, p55) and this has very close ties with photography as these types of locations have been photographed countless times. Is this one reason behind my choice of subject for the first assignment, even if I didn’t know it at the time? A sense of how I view the past and feel about such structures as ruined castles? The idea of physical structures in the landscape seen by our ancestors yet weather and changed through time is a powerful link between the present and the past and at same time, photographically, an accessable way of depicting the passage of time.

One final comment from me on this subject is the balance between one side of melancholy; the romantic and sadness and regret set against the other darker side of melancholy; madness, evil, witchcraft and the sign of the devil.  I wonder if there might be a future project showing this dichotomy of melancholy, the two, seemingly unrelated aspects of the same idea represented in a visual form? Although I touched on this idea of madness and evil, I don’t necessarily soo scope for this in my work in Photography 3. Unless of course, the madness is within myself. The sense of loss which impacts all sides of a life and colour views and opinions and behaviours.