There is the story of the infant Krishna,
wrongly accused of eating a bit of dirt. His mother, Yashoda, coming up to him
with a wagging finger, scolds him: “You shouldn’t eat dirt, you naughty boy.”
“But I haven’t,” says the unchallenged lord of all and everything, disguised as
a frightened human child. “Open your mouth,” orders Yashoda. Krishna does as he
is told. He opens his mouth and Yashoda gasps.
She sees in Krishna’s mouth the whole complete entire timeless
universe, all the stars and planets of space and the distance between them, all
the lands and seas of the earth and the life in them; she sees all the days of
yesterday and all the days of tomorrow; she sees all ideas and all emotions,
all pity and all hope, and the three strands of matter; not a pebble, candle,
creature, village or galaxy is missing, including herself and every bit of dirt
in its truthful place. “My Lord, you can close your mouth," she says
reverently.
In any part of the universe there is a whole universe: Hamlet saw the
infinite space in a nutshell; William Blake saw a world in a grain of sand, a
heaven in a wild flower, and eternity in an hour.
Humans are the universe pretending to be isolated individuals. Our
reality, as we know it, is the result of what is observed—the beholder, and his
point of view. Therefore, lines of thought such as the Western and Asian ones
create different realities from a common universe.
The Asian aesthetics and philosophical interpretation of the world
amaze and marvel westerners. Asian aesthetics and philosophy seem very
different from ours, and yet both the Asian and Western thought have a
simultaneous origin. Reviewing the Western thinkers, we can find in their
philosophy motivations that are also common to the Asian thinkers.
If we take a look at the pre-Socratic Greek philosophers of the
Milesian school, we discover a motivation shared by the Japanese: nature.
The ideals and concepts of Japanese aesthetics are primarily influenced
by religion. Both in Shinto and Buddhism, the Gods are not the creators of
nature, but nature is an individual entity. In our Western tradition, the
Judeo-Christian concept of God or Creator broke this link and made us separate
from the traditional aesthetic ideals of ancient Greece.
Regarding India, any systematic comparative study of its aesthetics and
that of the Western starts from Aristotle’s Poetics and Bharata’s (200
BCE-200CE) Natyasastra. What Aristotle
is to the Western tradition of aesthetics, Bharata is to the Indian tradition.
The most significant finding of Aristotle in Poetics is his doctrine of
catharsis whereas for Bharata the essence of aesthetics lies in bhava
(emotions) and rasa (sentiments).
Using photography and our imagination, we can explain concepts that are
hidden from our perception. We need this tool to generate visual metaphors that
help us understand our reality, what we are and what the world around us is
like.
Photographing these images we are not describing the element that
appears; but the experience of universal multiplicity generated by them. By
means of photography, we are able to communicate the same message to people
with different cultural references.












