Picture this: it is 02:34 New Years Day 2016. You stumble round the corner of Well Street, Manchester to find police wrangling with a man on the floor, others milling around the streets and a que of taxis. Hardest to miss however, is a middle-aged man, lying on the road reaching for his (somehow still upright) pint of lager like it is the fountain of youth. At that point you would probably look at your watch (or phone), realise your bed is calling and toddle off home thinking no more of the scene you had just witnessed. The lens of Joel Goodman however captures this scene with entirely different qualities than my brief scene setting affords.
image: Joel Goodman courtesy of Manchester Evening News https://www.manchestereveningnews.co.uk/news/greater-manchester-news/gallery/new-years-eve-2016-party-10673550
In Goodman's photograph we instead get this 16th-century-scene like depiction. The light from the taxi headlamps provides harsh shadows of the figures in the foreground. The framing of the scene is composed in line with golden ratio formations, the distinction between cool and warm tones on the left and right provide contrast and depth. All in all, when this photograph hit the internet at 12:12 the same day it is no surprise social media was quick to claim this as an example of Accidental Renaissance. To provide example, when compared with Giorgione's The Adoration of the Shepherds whilst the content is extremely far removed the visual similarities are undeniable.
Left: Giorgione, The Adoration of the Shepherds, 1505/1510, oil on panel, Samuel H. Kress Collection courtesy of National Gallery of art (America) https://www.nga.gov/features/slideshows/giorgione-and-the-high-renaissance-in-venice.html#slide_4
Right: Overlay of Golden Ratio over Joel Goodman's photograph courtesy of Indepest https://indepest.com/2020/02/26/accidental-renaissance/
The term Accidental Renaissance, according to Know your Meme, originated in 2014 and was first used by the Guardian to describe a photo of politicians fighting in Ukrainian parliament. Put simply Accidental Renaissance refers to any imagery taken without intention, but found to have, attributes in common with renaissance art. This is a broad category however, admins of the r/AccidentalRenaissance Reddit have defined that any photograph containing triangular, asymmetric, or dynamic composition; foreshortening; use of the golden ratio or Fibonacci sequence; sfumato or chiaroscuro is worthy of submission.
Above: post by Facebook user Manzil Lajur image courtesy of Know Your Meme https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/accidental-renaissance
How then is it possible for an un-staged photograph, taken in the 21st century with modern technology, to reflect the work of 15th/16th century renaissance masters? Botticelli and Da Vinci did not produce wonders such as the Birth of Venus and the Mona Lisa with such spontaneous chance so what affordances allow us to replicate their work in such an instantaneous manner? Maybe the answer lies within Oscar Wilde's 1889 essay The Decay of Lying. Wilde proposes a challenge to Aristotle and Plato's popular mimetic view proposing, for the first time, Anti-mimesis. Fancy philosophical words aside this means that unlike Aristotle and Plato, who proposed that art imitates life, Wilde proposed that life imitates art. Wilde believed that instead of art chiefly serving as a way of representing the truth of nature's beauty, art's chief function was to serve as a vehicle for human expression and imagination. Art is therefore based in 'abstract decoration, with purely imaginative and pleasurable work dealing with what is unreal and non-existent'. Wilde then goes on to propose that life sees the wonder in this imaginative realm and asks to be re-represented by the forms that allow it to sit in the intersection of dream and reality.
So, what does this mean for our New Years Eve partygoers? well for the people in the photo...nothing. They are nature, life in its actuality as it is happening. The same goes for if you were the figure in my introduction, you are viewing life without the lens of imagination and expression and as a result it is more banal. However, Joel Goodman's capture of life immediately causes the visual scene to undergo the transformation that Wilde states life desires. The example given by Wilde is that of Impressionist fog. Wilde talks of the impressionists painting 'wonderful brown fogs that come creeping down our streets, blurring the gas-lamps and changing the houses into monstrous shadows' and 'lovely silver mists that brood over our river, and turn to faint forms of fading grace curved bridge and swaying barge' that had previously not existed, not because these artists were actually part of some fog-making conspiracy, but because this fog had yet to be artistically represented. Through this Wilde proposes that nature itself is of our minds and our creation therefore 'things are because we see them, and what we see, and how we see it, depends on the Arts that have influenced us. '
Left: Impression, Sunrise, Claude Monet, 1872, Oil on Canvas, 48 x 63cm courtesy of https://www.claude-monet.com/impression-sunrise.jsp
Right: The Thames above Waterloo, J.M.W Turner, c.1830-35, Oil on Canvas, 90.5 × 121 cm courtesy of https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/turner-the-thames-above-waterloo-bridge-n01992
To answer my previous question then, we view these images of Accidental Renaissance as such because our conception of life and nature is shaped by our knowledge of pre-existing artistic conventions. The act of photography changes this scene from a lived experience to an artifact of visual culture. Once we view this scene as visual culture the schematics of the arts arise; suddenly the renaissance attributes take precedent over the accident. Therefore, because we know what renaissance looks like (and its methods and techniques have been established as pure artistic skill for centuries) we find it is attributes more easily identifiable in life as it moulds to the artist's will. The gradual fade of light as objects fall out of the streetlamp’s perimeter becomes sfumato; the blackness of the Superdry storefront becomes chiaroscuro; the fanning of figures across the scene become a product of Fibonacci's spiral. Without Goodman freeze-framing this moment of life it would not have become art at all. By Wilde's thinking it is Goodman we must thank as the expresser of imagination for allowing us to see what is otherwise not there in life's actuality.
Whilst 2016 was a long time ago now, the phenomena of accidental renaissance shows no sign of slowing down with new images appearing on r/AccidentalRennaisance daily (if not hourly). The beauty of such a phenomenon is its re-instatement of the importance of visual culture to our daily lives. When we look, we do so through a lens that has been shaped by centuries of evolution within our knowledge of the arts, media, and culture. Maybe then the act of looking is not so different to that of artmaking. With this in mind, I encourage you to take a leaf out of Oscar Wilde's book, look for your own life's imitation of art, who knows you may have a Mona Lisa in your camera roll.
Bibliography :
Oscar Wilde, The Decay of Lying, 1889 https://www.gutenberg.org/files/887/887-0.txt
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