Academic literature on the topic 'Dark Romanticism'

Abstract: Analyzing the words and phrases used in Edgar Allan Poe’s Lenore can portray the characteristics of the Dark Romanticism era of the United States of America, which consist of 1) imagination, 2) nature, 3) symbolism and myth, 4) intuition and subjectivity, and 5) individualism. Through a biographical and sociological approach, it was found that there were words in Lenore that support the Dark Romanticism characteristics. The dark, creepy, gloomy, and dreary, words that hint the feeling of Poe’s uneasiness while living a dark and difficult life in the 1800s in America were “no tear… weep now”, “grief and groan”, “Stygian River”, “golden brown”, “Hope”, “Peccavimus”, “Lenore” and “death”.Key words: Edgar Allan Poe, poem, romanticism era, dark romanticism, LenoreAbstrak: Menganalisis kata-kata yang digunakan oleh Edgar Allan Poe dalam puisinya Lenore dapat memperlihatkan karakteristik dari masa Dark Romanticism yang dialami oleh negara Amerika Serikat, yaitu adanya karakteristik: 1) imagination, 2) nature, 3) symbolism and myth, 4) intuition and subjectivity, dan 5) individualism. Melalui pendekatan biografi dan sosiologi maka ditemukan beberapa kosa kata dari puisi Lenore yang mendukung masa Dark Romanticism yang dipenuhi dengan lingkungan yang gelap, menyeramkan, dan menyedihkan itu. Beberapa kosa kata yang menandakan ketidaknyamanan Poe dalam melalui kehidupannya pada tahun 1800an di Amerika Serikat adalah kata “no tear… weep now”, “grief and groan”, “Stygian River”, “golden brown”, “Hope”, “Peccavimus”, “Lenore” and “death”.Kata kunci: Edgar Allan Poe, puisi, era romantisisme, dark romanticism, Lenore

In “Some Remarks on Konrad Bayer” Oswald Wiener reflects on his deceased friend and collaborator. Arguing that Bayer's personal presence was more influential than his literary work, Wiener focuses on experiments Bayer conducted in his milieu, which aimed at predicting and manipulating the behavior of others. If the other proved hard enough to predict, according to Wiener, such experiments could complicate the participants' representations of the situation to such an extent that they would induce ecstatic states. Wiener connects these experiments to epistemological questions and relates them to different literary and artistic traditions including Dark Romanticism, Surrealism, and dandyism.

This review seeks to analyse the short story “The Masque of the Red Death”, by Edgar Allan Poe, and to study its connection to the anti-transcendentalist and dark romantic movements. Through an examination of the literary aspects contained in the story, this work aims to inspect Poe's writing style, notedly marked by a bold approach of the themes of death, mourning and decay, and to compare his aesthetic decisions - such as the strong symbolic streak, the reliance on colour and architecture and the artistic depiction of death - to the chief tenets that influenced anti-transcendentalist writers over the 19th century.

The musical aesthetics of neofolk has held a significant place within Germany’s dark alternative scene since the early 1980s. With its keen interest in paganism, dark romanticism, and völkisch mysticism, this genre is often associated with right-wing ideologies. Neofolk has been accused by some of creating acceptable social spaces for fascist cultural ideals, and by others for harnessing contradictory right-wing messages as new modes of aesthetic creativity and provocation. This article explores the continued popularity of the English band, Death in June, in Germany and seeks to problematize critics’ attempts to unequivocally characterize the band and genre as nostalgia- laden hipster fascism.

Romanticism and surrealism shared a fascination with the fairy tale. Yet each was beholden to specific historical moments and particular aesthetic demands. What they wanted were not the same. This article considers how the romantic fairy tale nevertheless functions as a ‘seed’ for surrealists. Contagions, commonalities, and contrasts between the two movements are briefly outlined. A selection of fairy tales by Hans Christian Andersen is used to demonstrate how a host of visual reinterpretations including lithographs, photo-collages, and video art by twentieth-century surrealists like Salvador Dalí and Max Ernst, and twenty-first-century avant-garde artists like Åsa Sjöström, have reinterpreted the latent possibilities of non-sense in the fairy tale: the marvelous, the absurd, and the dream-like. The article demonstrates that by evoking the dark-romantic sides of Andersen’s works these avant-garde reconceptualizations in visual media predominantly point to shock, violence, war, and ecological disasters.

This paper examines the differences between the Romantic, the Gothic, and the Dark Romantic literary genres by looking at the manifestations of the trope of the double within the works of Edgar Allan Poe, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and Herman Melville. The notion of the individual versus that of individualism helps highlight the disparity between Gothicism and Dark Romance, and the implications that these differences hold.

Walt Whitman has long been celebrated as a Romantic writer who celebrates the self, reveres Nature, claims unity in all things, and sings praises to humanity. However, some of what Whitman has to say has been overlooked. Whitman often questioned the goodness of humanity. He recognized evil in various shapes. He pondered death and the imperturbability of Nature to human death. He exhibited nightmarish imagery in some of his works and gory violence in others. While Whitman has long been called a celebratory poet, he is nevertheless also in part a writer of the Dark Romantic.

Reading James Hogg’s 1824 novel The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner through a postsecular lens provides a new framework for spirituality. This framework establishes spirituality as a place of tension and uncertainty between the text’s main ideologies—Enlightenment rationality and religious, specifically Calvinist, fanaticism. The text explores this place of tension through its doubled narrative structure and by demonstrating the crisis of faith that the fictional Editor of the text undergoes. Confessions brings a compelling new paradigm to discussions of the postsecular that allows insight into the complex intersections of Enlightenment rationality and empiricism as well as religious zealotry and the supernatural.

Tematem rozprawy jest problem wpływu czarnego romantyzmu na współczesną prozę popularną, polską, jak również zagraniczną. Inspiracją do przeprowadzenia takiej analizy są poglądy niektórych badaczy (m.in. Marii Janion, Agaty Bielik-Robson), twierdzących, że romantyzm w Polsce wymaga nowego zdefiniowania i reinterpretacji, przez lata był bowiem kojarzony głównie z hasłami narodowowyzwoleńczymi, narosło też wokół niego wiele stereotypów. Obecnie można zaobserwować stopniową zmianę w polskich badaniach nad romantyzmem, który coraz częściej zaczyna być postrzegany jako zjawisko estetycznofilozoficzne, rzadziej niż w przeszłości łączy się go natomiast z kwestiami historiozoficznymi czy politycznymi. To z kolei pozwala traktować romantyzm nie tylko jako zakończoną epokę w historii literatury i sztuki, ale również jako specyficzny styl, obecny również we współczesnych utworach. Problemy z polską interpretacją romantyzmu stają się widoczne, kiedy porównamy związaną z nim angielską i polską terminologię. W języku angielskim istnieje rzeczownik romanticism oraz przymiotnik romantic (który jednak pochodzi od romance – czyli typu utworu literackiego), natomiast w języku polskim – „romantyzm”, „romantyczny”, ale także „romantyczność” – określenie używane przez romantycznych krytyków i twórców, np. Adama Mickiewicza czy Kazimierza Brodzińskiego. „Romantyczność” nie jest jednak, jak romantyzm, określeniem epoki, ale stylu danego utworu, jego nastrojowości, itp. Tak rozumiana „romantyczność” bliska jest pojęciu czarnego romantyzmu, nurtu w literaturze i sztuce powstałego na przełomie XVIII i XIX w., którego charakterystycznymi cechami są: mroczna atmosfera utworów, tajemniczy bohaterowie odkrywający sekrety egzystencji, motywy związane ze śmiercią, melancholią czy szaleństwem, nawiązania do baśni i ludowości, szczególnie w jej demonicznym wymiarze, itp. Czarny romantyzm kojarzony jest szczególnie z twórczością amerykańskich autorów, jak Edgar Allan Poe, Nathaniel Hawthorne czy Herman Melville, jednak nurt ten jest obecny także w utworach europejskich (E. T. A. Hoffmann, Emily Bronte, Lord Byron, Mary Shelley). Chociaż nigdy nie był uważany za charakterystyczny dla polskiej literatury, jego elementy pojawiają się w dziełach Antoniego Malczewskiego, Seweryna Goszczyńskiego, Romana Zmorskiego czy Juliusza Słowackiego. Należy jednak zaznaczyć, że problem polskiej recepcji czarnego romantyzmu nie został dotąd dokładnie przeanalizowany, chociaż powstaje coraz więcej prac na ten temat. W ostatnich latach można zaobserwować częstą obecność czarnego romantyzmu w europejskiej i amerykańskiej kulturze popularnej. Mroczne romantyczne motywy pojawiają się w literaturze, filmach, jak również w reklamie, grach komputerowych, modzie, itp. Zjawisko to jest typowe dla literatury amerykańskiej czy europejskiej, podczas gdy w Polsce jest stosunkowo nowe. Oznacza to, że romantyzm, interpretowany w kategoriach stylu, pozostaje nadal aktualny w XXI w. Celem rozprawy jest zbadanie na podstawie wybranych przykładów, w jaki sposób wątki i motywy charakterystyczne dla czarnego romantyzmu funkcjonują we współczesnej prozie popularnej, oraz wykazanie, że to właśnie odwołania do czarnoromantycznej estetyki bywają tym, co w dużej mierze decyduje o poczytności popularnych utworów i o ich atrakcyjności dla współczesnych czytelników. Analizowane przykłady pochodzą z najnowszej literatury popularnej (od lat 90-tych XX w. aż do chwili obecnej), polskiej, jak również zachodnioeuropejskiej, która została przetłumaczona na język polski, a zatem jest dostępna dla licznych odbiorców w Polsce. Rozprawa składa się z pięciu rozdziałów. W pierwszym z nich przedstawione są zagadnienia teoretyczne i historycznoliterackie: problemy z interpretacją pojęcia „romantyzmu” i „romantyczności”, opinie krytyków dawnych i współczesnych na temat tego zjawiska, następnie historia powstania nurtu czarnego romantyzmu oraz jego charakterystyka. Rozdział ten kończy refleksja na temat przedmiotu rozprawy, a więc kultury popularnej, jej rozumienia i definicji proponowanych przez poszczególnych badaczy. Rozdział drugi poświęcony jest twórczości Carlosa Ruiza Zafóna. Analizowane są w nim cztery powieści dla młodzieży: Książę Mgły, Pałac Północy, Światła września i Marina, które realizują stały schemat, polegający na łączeniu licznych wątków i motywów znanych z literatury romantyzmu, zwłaszcza niemieckiego, angielskiego i amerykańskiego. Szczególna uwaga poświęcona jest takim zagadnieniom jak: gotycko-romantyczna przestrzeń, postaci typowych bohaterów romantycznych (szatan, „współczesny doktor Frankenstein”, sobowtór, piękna kobieta, która umiera), romantyczna melancholia, narracja oraz „apokaliptyczne” zakończenia powieści. Rozdział trzeci dotyczy romantycznego motywu podróży w czasie, wspólnego dla opowiadań Fredericka Forsytha pt. „Szepczący Wiatr” i powieści Krzysztofa Kotowskiego pt. Krew na placu Lalek. Funkcjonowanie tego motywu jest badane poprzez analizę problemu narracji, postaci romantycznych bohaterów, nawiązań do romantycznych legend, ballad i podań (np. „Rip Van Winkle” Washingtona Irvinga i „Lenora” G. A. Bürgera) oraz sposobu wykorzystania romantycznej estetyki grozy. Rozdział czwarty skupia się na polskiej literaturze fantasy, reprezentowanej przez dwa popularne cykle opowiadań Andrzeja Sapkowskiego o wiedźminie Geralcie oraz Anny Kańtoch o Domenicu Jordanie. Oboje twórcy, podobnie jak romantycy, stają się zbieraczami baśni i legend, które – odpowiednio przetworzone – często stanowią podstawę dla ich opowiadań. Dlatego też w rozdziale tym analizowane są liczne odniesienia do romantycznej ludowości, szczególnie w jej demonicznym wymiarze, jak również specyficznie skonstruowane postaci romantycznych protagonistów, zyskujących dużą popularność wśród odbiorców. Ostatni, piąty rozdział poświęcony jest zjawisku utworów popularnych, których bohaterami stają się znani autorzy oraz ich dzieła. Przedstawione są w nim dwie powieści kryminalne, nawiązujące swoim stylem do estetyki czarnego romantyzmu: Sherlock Holmes i mądrość umarłych Rodolfa Martíneza oraz Jul Pawła Goźlińskiego. Oba utwory świadczą o tym, że nurt ten może być atrakcyjny dla współczesnego odbiorcy, a jak pokazuje przykład Jula, polski romantyzm w wersji narodowowyzwoleńczej można interpretować w zupełnie inny sposób niż dotychczas. Analizy te mają wykazać, że elementy czarnego romantyzmu są obecne we współczesnej literaturze popularnej, także w Polsce, co oznacza, że stopniowo może nastąpić zmiana w polskim postrzeganiu romantyzmu, nie tylko wśród badaczy. Potrzebne wydają się zatem nie tylko dalsze badania recepcji czarnego romantyzmu w literaturze współczesnej, ale też w literaturze XIX-wiecznej, gdyż mogłyby one ukazać polski romantyzm w całkowicie nowym świetle.
The thesis discusses the problem of the influence of so-called Dark Romanticism on contemporary popular literature, foreign as well as Polish. The starting point for the analysis is some Polish researchers’ (e.g. Maria Janion, Agata Bielik-Robson) opinion that nowadays Romanticism needs reinterpretation in Poland. Over the years it has been associated mainly with patriotic issues, which was the result of Poland’s complicated political situation. However, in the 21st century more and more Polish researchers have been trying to show another face of Romanticism, treating it as an aesthetic phenomenon, rather than connecting it with political and historiosophical questions, such as Polish messianism. This significant change also enables considering Romanticism not only as a closed period in the history of literature and art, but as a style, characterised by a set of specific features and still present in literary works. It has to be mentioned that such a point of view has been popular in foreign researches for years – one of the best examples is The Mirror and the Lamp. Romantic Theory and the Critical Tradition by M. H. Abrams. The problem with Polish interpretation of Romanticism is especially visible when one considers the Polish translation of this word. Romanticism can be, on one hand, translated as romantyzm (the period in history, starting at the beginning of the 19th century), but one should note that there is also a similar Polish word, romantyczność, used by Polish poets and critics at the beginning of the 19th century, which concerns the mentioned style. The thesis focuses on the second meaning of Romanticism. Romantyczność can be easily associated with Dark Romanticism, the literary and art movement, rooted in some significant phenomena of the 18th century: popularity of wild gardens and ruins, “graveyard poetry”, new aesthetic concepts, such as “the sublime”, as well as the Gothic romance, which flourished in England and strongly influenced European literature. The most characteristic features of works representing Dark Romanticism are: gloomy atmosphere, motifs connected with death, melancholy, insanity, mysterious characters who unveil the “dark side” of their souls, references to folklore and fairytales, etc. Dark Romanticism seems to be especially typical for 19th -century American literature (e.g. Edgar Allan Poe, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Herman Melville), but its motifs can also be found in numerous European works (e.g. by Ernst Theodor Amadeus Hoffmann, Lord Byron, Mary Shelley, Emily Bronte). Although Dark Romanticism has not been considered typical for Polish literature, its elements appear in works by some authors (e.g. Antoni Malczewski, Seweryn Goszczyński, Roman Zmorski). However, the problem of Polish reception of Dark Romanticism still seems not fully discussed by researchers. In recent years the growing presence of Dark Romanticism in European and American popular culture can be observed. Gloomy Romantic motifs appear in literature, films, as well as in advertisements, computer games, fashion, etc. The thesis’ aim is to prove that Dark Romanticism plays an important role in contemporary popular literature, moreover, sometimes it probably contributes to particular works’ success among readers. Such phenomenon has been typical for American and Western European literature, whereas it is relatively new in Poland. It means that Romanticism is still valid for the 21st century, provided that one interprets it as a characteristic style. This thesis discusses novels and short stories published within the last twenty years (mostly in the 21st century). They are written by Polish authors or have been translated to Polish, so they are available for the vast number of readers in Poland. The first chapter of the thesis focuses on theoretical issues, such as various definitions of Romanticism (provided by contemporary and Romantic critics), the roots, history and characteristic features of Dark Romanticism, as well as a definition of the subject of this thesis: popular literature. The second chapter analyses the works of Carlos Ruiz Zafón written for young readers (or, as Zafón claims, “young at heart”): The Prince of Mist, The Midnight Palace, The Watcher in the Shadows, and Marina. They turned out to be a great success in the world, as well as in Poland, and numerous references to Dark Romanticism might be one of the reasons. The chapter discusses such Romantic motifs in Zafón’s novels as gloomy landscapes, typical Romantic heroes (the devil, “the contemporary doctor Frankenstein”, the beautiful woman who has to die, the doppelgänger). It also analyses the characters’ melancholy, the narration of the novels, and their “apocalyptic” endings. The third chapter concerns the Romantic motif of travels in time and space presented in the short story “Whispering Wind” by Frederick Forsyth and in the novel Krew na placu Lalek by Krzysztof Kotowski. “Whispering Wind” can be easily compared to two famous Romantic works: first of all to “Rip Van Winkle” by Washington Irving , but also to “Lenore” by Gottfried August Bürger. References to the gloomy Romantic style in both narratives by Forsyth and Kotowski can be observed in their way of storytelling (gradually discovered secrets of the main characters), as well as creating some scenes with the use of the aesthetics of horror. The fourth chapter is dedicated to Polish fantasy literature. It discusses two cycles of short stories by well-known Polish authors, Andrzej Sapkowski (The Last Wish, The Sword of Destiny) and Anna Kańtoch (Diabeł na wieży, Zabawki diabła). Both cycles seem to be created in “a Romantic way”. The writers, just like those in the 19th century, collect folk legends and fairytales about demonic creatures and use elements of such narratives to build a completely new story. Moreover, both introduce into their short stories a typical Romantic hero – complicated, mysterious, hiding gloomy secrets connected with his past. Such characters turn out to be very interesting for the reader, which can be proved by the commercial success of both cycles. The last, fifth chapter analyses the phenomenon of fiction about famous writers who became the characters in contemporary novels. The discussed examples are The Wisdom of the Dead by Rodolfo Martínez and Jul by Pawel Gozlinski. In the first one there appears a criminal named Lovecraft, who tries to steal a mysterious old book, The Necronomicon. In the second one horrible murders similar to those depicted in dramas by Juliusz Slowacki are committed among the Polish community in Paris in the 19th century and the suspect seems to be Slowacki himself. It is the Romantic atmosphere of mystery connected with the famous characters that attracts reader’s attention in both crime stories. What is more, the gloomy style of the novels proves that works by H. P. Lovecraft and Słowacki are, in a way, examples of Dark Romanticism in literature, even though it may not be the first association when one thinks about these authors. It is especially important in the case of Jul, because Pawel Gozlinski claims that he wants to unveil a new face of Polish Romanticism, free from stereotypes created over the years in Poland. Whereas The Wisdom of the Dead proves that Dark Romanticism should not be reduced only to the first half of the 19th century (Lovecraft is a 20th -century writer), Jul shows that Polish Romantic literature can be interpreted in new way, completely different from the “traditional” one. In conclusion, it is said that elements of Dark Romanticism are present in the contemporary popular literature, which seems to be especially significant in Poland, where the attitude towards Romanticism has been recently changing. It is also claimed that not only the reception of Dark Romanticism in contemporary literature should be further analysed. Important is as well the problem of Polish reception of Dark Romanticism in the 19th century, because new interpretations of some works could shed a new light on Polish Romanticism.

This paper is a contribution to recent scholarly interest in the intersections of post-Kantian idealism and Romanticism. It traces overlapping concerns in Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph Schelling’s and Novalis’ works. Both thinkers began their philosophical studies with critical engagements of the philosophy of Johann Gottlieb Fichte, developing similar arguments for the duplicity of relationships of identity and the problem of their mediation. Novalis and Schelling also explored the intersections of mind and nature through notions of potentiation and depotentiation, stimulated by their respective philosophical examinations of contemporary mathematics and natural sciences. Finally, both thinkers introduced figures of a dark ground or night—Novalis in Hymns to the Night and Schelling in works as diverse as On the World Soul and Philosophical Investigations into the Essence of Human Freedom—to present the unpresentability of the infinite. Although there is little historical documentation of direct borrowings of one thinker from the other, these overlapping concerns are richly suggestive.

Faflak explores a different kind of orientation towards such contemporaneity: through meditations on the film musical, Faflak powerfully traces the emergent rhetoric of virtuality and subjugation that the genre performs by way of a harnessing of the visual. Borrowing in part from terms familiar in Debord as well as using Tim Burton’s Sweeney Todd and Lars von Trier’s Dancer in the Dark, Faflak demonstrates how Shelley’s The Triumph of Life stages decisive, historical encounters with the “spectacles of culture” that mark a particular turn away from romantic unknowing and inspire a post-Enlightenment culture of assimilation and foreclosure.

Hitchcock and Herrmann had a symbiotic and complementary artistic relationship. However, as this chapter contends, rather than necessarily synergic in their understanding of the unified requirements of drama, sometimes their complementary relationship took on a different character. In Marnie, Herrmann’s music attempted to ameliorate Hitchcock’s dark interests, in an attempt to romanticize Hitchcock’s bleak and grotesque story about a psychologist’s fantasy about possessing a disturbed kleptomaniac killer, which includes a deeply disquieting rape scene. The music moves to make these elements bearable, with a ‘sleight of hand’ that misdirects us from the utter darkness and irredeemable characters and obscene aspects of the film narrative.

This chapter contains Vladimir Nabokov's letter to Edmund Wilson, in which he criticized William Faulkner's novel Light in August that was sent to him by Wilson. In his letter, dated November 21, 1948, Nabokov expresses his dislike of Faulkner's work. In particular, Nabokov says he detests Faulkner's romanticism and claims that he can only explain the latter's popularity in France by the fact that all the popular mediocre writers in the country in recent years have also had their fling at l'homme marchait, la nuit était sombre [the man was walking, the night was dark]. According to Nabokov, Light in August is one of the tritest and most tedious examples of a trite and tedious genre.

The concluding chapter to the book seeks to account for the changes that the architectural imagination underwent in the first four decades of the nineteenth century. Guided by the concept of ‘purification’, it shows how the construct of the Gothic ‘Dark Ages’ was revised in contemporary historiography and replaced with the less injurious notion of the ‘medieval’; how first- and second-generation romanticism curtailed the excesses of the Gothic architectural imagination; and how nineteenth-century Gothic Revivalists such as A. C. Pugin, A. W. N. Pugin, and John Ruskin reacted against the amateur Gothic experiments of Horace Walpole and William Beckford. What emerges in the discussion is an architectural imagination that is very different from the one of the previous century, that rich, associative aesthetic that drove the production of Gothic literature and revivalist architecture from the start. In a brief coda, the discussion briefly charts the professionalization of architectural practice that took effect from 1834 onwards.

Beginning the final section of the book, which shows how early Romanticism tames the spiritualist impulse, this chapter considers poetic re-embodiment in relation to psychological depression, called “gloom” by the poet and critic Anna Letitia Barbauld. She faulted Edward Young for having popularized a dangerously gloomy sublimity that, by separating souls from bodies, desensitized readers to subtle and modest everyday feelings. As a remedy, her writing praises the enlightened “chearfulness” of Mark Akenside, a healthy middle register of embodied emotion that is neither too dark nor too bright. Yet Barbauld eventually came to agree, the chapter argues, with medical experts who had decided that melancholy is an affliction more of matter than mind. Late poems, crowned by Eighteen Hundred and Eleven (1812), both accept that gloom belongs in the physical body and identify the poet’s own voice with that body. De-souled and dispirited, Barbauld at last domesticates Young’s otherworldly passion. She makes depression political by making it ordinary.

Palabras clave:Fotografía, estética, Humberto Rivas, Rafael Argullol, Eugenio Trías.Keywords: Photography, esthetic, Humberto Rivas, Rafael Argullol, Eugenio Trías.Resumen:El siguiente artículo busca dar una lectura a la obra del fotógrafo Humberto Rivas, Premio Nacional de Fotografía y unos de los mayores exponentes de la fotografía española de finales del siglo XX. Se parte de la convicción de que hace falta ubicar a Humberto Rivas en una tradición de pensamiento estético, ya que las distintas lecturas que existen sobre su trabajo, aunque importantes, no han dejado de ser lecturas impresionistas que no han reflexionado en profundidad sobre su obra. Este artículo trata de ver a Rivas a partir de unas categorías estéticas. Para ello se remite a las reflexiones de Rafael Argullol para distinguir aquello propio del artista romántico, y a las aportaciones filosóficas de Eugenio Trías acerca de lo siniestro en la obra de arte, y las vincula a la obra de Humberto Rivas. La hipótesis inicial es de que Rivas no se sentía como un fotógrafo que atrapa momentos o documenta acontecimientos, sino como un creador, y su obra es resultado de un artista que se repliega sobre sí mismo con la intención de producir una imagen reflejo de su mundo interior, la cual se puede explicar desde la mente del artista romántico, aunque el contexto no sea el romanticismo. Por último, aunque el artículo hable sobre Humberto Rivas, también es una manera de construir un relato entre la imagen fotográfica y distintos valores estéticos que hacen parte la historia del arte. Abstract:The following article seeks to give a reading to the work of photographer Humberto Rivas, National Photography Prize and one of the greatest exponents of Spanish photography at the end of the 20th century. It is based on the conviction that it is necessary to locate Humberto Rivas in a translation of aesthetic thought, since the different readings that exist on his work, although important, have not ceased to be Impressionist readings that have not reflected in depth on his work . This article tries to see Rivas from some aesthetic categories. For this he refers to the reflections of Rafael Argullol to distinguish that of the romantic artist and the philosophical contributions of Eugenio Trías about the sinister in the work of art, and links them to the work of Humberto Rivas. The initial hypothesis is that Rivas did not feel like a photographer who catches moments or documents events, but as a creator, and his work is the result of an artist who recoils on himself with the intention of producing a reflex image of Its inner world, which can be explained, from the mind of the romantic artist although the context is not romanticism. Finally, although the article talks about Humberto Rivas, it is also a way to build a narrative between the photographic image and the values ​​that have served to interpret painting or sculpture in the history of art.