Josmaramellado

The very first photos by Nicéphore Niépce (circa 1826 and 1835) were views from windows of gardens. Thus from the beginning photography was concerned with the representation of nature and the man-made environment. The origins of photography also took place at the peak of the Romantic Movement in both poetry and painting whose foremost exponents were the English poet Percy Bysshe Shelley and the German painter Caspar David Friedrich. Friedrich, in particular, created a style of painting that has become known as the Romantic Sublime with its emphasis on rendering exalted, spiritual landscapes. It is worth remembering that the Romantic Moment flourished at an time when the Industrial Revolution was sweeping across Europe, transforming the landscape, and opening up travel to more people than ever before. It was a time when people feared that Mother Nature would soon be smothered in a pall of smoke and bound by railway networks. The poets and painters exalted this apparent last gasp of Nature, travelled far, and celebrated it in word and image. Of the painters, none was more famous than Friedrich whose best-known works include The Wanderer above the Sea of Mist (1818) and Polar Sea (1824). What is not remembered is that Friedrich combined disparate elements from nature in his paintings to produce his sublime images. In other words, Friedrich’s brilliantly evocative paintings used techniques that we use today in Photoshop to produce images that seem to us to be more beautiful, more sublime, and thus more truly natural.

José María Mellado is a poet of the photographic sublime. His images, generally, are taken at the intersections of man and nature and show factories, working or abandoned, ships, campgrounds, and various man-made structures. With a host of digital techniques at his command—he is the author of two books on digital photography, a frequent lecturer on the subject and currently president of the Royal Photographic Society of Spain—he produces images that transcend straight photography while retaining photography’s apparent claim to verisimilitude.

Mellado transforms his images, of course, but with a certain understanding. “Yes, I transform them,” he writes. “I am not interested in being faithful to reality. The natural landscape as such is beautiful, but I am not interested in that. In these transformations there are no limits. What I do not do is put in objects, people, or animals that were not there in actual reality.” He subtly adjusts his colors, embellishes the tones for dramatic effect that can be described as more real than real, in other words, “hyper-real.”

At the level of metaphor, Mellado’s transformations both point out man’s intervention in nature and take advantage of man-made techniques to produce his optically enhanced images. The incredible clouds over a geothermal plant in Iceland recall Friedrich’s misty mountains. The red tubes in the foreground that will later be used to duct steam to heat homes and greenhouses are set in infinite depth of a field under a sky of romantic, swirling mist. In yet another scene from Iceland where the natural light is already striking, a seemingly lost road sign divides the invisible lanes of a lava road in the middle of the country. Mellado’s interventions skirt the edge of the perceptible. We scarcely notice them. They affect us subliminally. His images are only made possible digitally, yet they are as real and powerful to us as anything the Romantics ever produced. Mellado proves that photography can really be “the new painting” and that he is a poet of the digital sublime who uses enhanced techniques to express his art where straight photography cannot.