Monday, January 12, 2015

Carl Young quote

I gotta look into Carl Jung, I keep seeing some dang insightful quotes by him.

“Your vision will become clear only when you can look into your own heart. Who looks outside, dreams; who looks inside, awakes.” – Carl Jung

3 comments:

Jonathan Charles said...

Yep, he's da man! (IMHO)

Also worth a look (in the same theme) "Mythologems" by James Hollis - a touch-stone for my photography.

Eolake Stobblehouse said...

I saw some nice nature nudes on your blog, Jon.
Did you find me via DOMAI?

How does Jungian philosophy relate to your photography?

Jonathan Charles said...

Thanks Eolake. I found this blog via Flickr where I now post most of my photos. I saw a photo of yours of the lovely model Marketa which I had seen a few years before but claimed by someone else. At the time I was so struck by her beauty that I did a search and found you were the original photographer but that there were many copies scattered around the net. Then, about 2½ years ago I saw your photo of her on Flickr (and left a comment). I was reminded again yesterday when someone else commented on it - and so looked up your other interests.

Jungian psychology is based on the idea that we are all motivated by subconscious drives and only feel satisfied with ourselves when we are making progress with one (or more) of them in real life. The problem is that consciously we have no direct knowledge of what these drives are at any stage in our life so we have to look for clues - basically by noting anything that seems to catch our attention, especially more than once (this is the basis of the "synchronicity" idea). He looked at the myths and folklore stories of different cultures and found many similar themes he called mythologems: his view was that these stories survived over hundreds of years because they do resonate with the inner drives of enough people. This shared imagery he called the collective unconscious.

I have always thought that our appreciation of art and beauty is also based on these mythologems, one particularly strong one being the ideal of humanity being in harmony with nature, a kind of return to The Garden of Eden but this time with knowledge and responsibility. This has been the theme of much of my work. It was very exciting for me to find these ideas expressed in the James Hollis book I mentioned.

Seeing some of your writings I think you have some quite similar ideas. I wasn't aware of most of your photography but looked up your website DOMAI and was amazed at the size of it and enormous range of beautiful women photographed. I guess you could not have taken all of them yourself but you have maintaned an extremely high standard of beauty without explicit sexuality, especially a kind of innocence which challenges the viewer to recognise that appreciation of naked feminine beauty is not the same as pornography or even "glamour" (= in The Garden of Eden, not in the outside world of exploitation and domination). It must now be a big commercial enterprise - are you still running the site do you have a team of people to do that while you move on to other things?