Rethinking the image in digital terms allows us to reframe the perception of visual capture; the eye and the lens of a mobile phone now become a device that projects new forms of appreciation, ranging from the abstract to the concrete. However, this has become the new way of capturing images, moments, and memories through a digital click, thus replacing the technical and practical methodology involved in using a photographic camera.

The body of the person who acts as photographer has undergone an epistemological shift, as it is now, in most cases, replaced by a hand movement and arm extension. Selfies are the new way of self-projecting into an image, thus mirroring that Renaissance technique and custom where painters would portray themselves in their works. The image operates in memory as a coercive element to process the past, understand the present, and attempt to predict the future.

For Augustine of Hippo, memory is a faculty of the soul that remembers, that brings the absent into the present. This faculty of the soul allows memory to create a vast storehouse of memories, where a large catalog of images and things resides—those same things that account for reality. In modern terms, we see this reflected similarly in digital archives stored on mobile or storage devices such as USB drives, hard disks, micro and SD cards, etc.

But if today every image capture via a mobile device is produced in an (in)mediate manner, then spontaneity seems to displace the moment of the sublime, focusing solely on beauty, thereby tearing apart the aesthetic reflection developed through the technical and analytical faculty that the artist or photographer engages when attempting to capture a transcendent image.

This type of aesthetic dilemma takes us back to the argument that the German philosopher Immanuel Kant put forward when he made the analytical distinction between the beautiful and the sublime:

But the most important and deepest difference between the sublime and the beautiful is certainly the following: that when—as is reasonable—we only and primarily consider the sublime in objects of nature (the sublime in art is always limited by the conditions of compatibility with nature), the beauty of nature (which is self-sufficient) carries a purposefulness in its form by which, so to speak, the object appears to be predetermined for our judgment. In contrast, that which, without subtleties, merely in apprehension, provokes in us the feeling of the sublime (according to its form certainly contrary to purpose and unsuitable for our judgment) may appear inadequate for our capacity for presentation and, so to speak, do violence to the imagination; yet precisely because of that, it will be judged all the more sublime.
(Kant, Immanuel, Critique of Judgment, Antonio Machado Libros, Madrid, 2016, p. 174)

Understanding this analytical distinction allows us to grasp the epistemic importance that images taken with digital devices now have in comparison with analog photography. Indeed, the question that arises is: can we consider something sublime in a digital photograph taken by a cellphone as opposed to one taken with a photographic camera? For a conservative stance regarding the importance of the photographic camera, this type of image could be considered an act of desecration of the sacred pedestal once held by the photographic lens.

However, wasn’t it Jean-Luc Godard, one of the great filmmakers, who began experimenting with reflex cameras to explore new ways of making cinema—at a time when these devices were not intended to be professional video cameras? If the legitimization of technological forms of producing moving images has shifted due to technological development and reduced costs, is it not the same as what Walter Benjamin asserted when he stated the following:

With photography, the exhibition value begins to prevail over the ritual value across the board. But the latter does not yield without resistance. It takes a last stand in the human face. It is by no means coincidental that portraiture was photography’s primary occupation in its early days. The cult value of the image found its final refuge in the remembrance of loved ones, distant or deceased. In the earliest photographs, the aura offers us a final gesture from the fleeting expression of a human face. In this lies its melancholic beauty, which has no comparison. And where the human being withdraws from photography, exhibition value for the first time gains the upper hand over cult value. In capturing the streets of Paris in deserted views, Atget found the stage for this process; this is where his incomparable importance lies. It has rightly been said of him that he photographed these streets as if each were a ‘crime scene’.
(Benjamin, Walter, The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction, Editorial Ítaca, Mexico, 2003, p. 58)

Following this premise laid out by Walter Benjamin, I affirm that the Cartesian self is reflected in the artwork of Renaissance painters who depicted themselves in their pieces, and analogously today, a selfie in an Instagram feed reclaims the Renaissance Cartesian self. This leads me to think that, if the concept of self—as a self projected into an image—aims to be transcendent through a technological-digital self-production, then the contemplation of the sublime is projected into the object of contemplation that the natural state of things reveals.

In this sense, and following this discursive line, I must point out that the work of Milene Zozaya reflects a redemptive act of the exercise of the sublime. It is faithful, in a Kantian philosophical sense, to the concept of the sublime, but redemptive in terms of symbolic restoration of the classical—it is a symbolic return to philosophical reflection. And as Leo Strauss would state, it is at the same time an act of repentance:

Repentance is return, meaning the return from the wrong path to the right one.
(Strauss, Leo, Progress and Return?, Ediciones Paidós, Barcelona, 2004, p. 148)

But like any vindicative act, this act of redemption becomes in itself a deliberately political act. Yet every act of contrast always generates conflict—and every epistemic conflict, in this case aesthetic, is a Hegelian dialectical exercise, struggling to survive amid the critique of modern art. Milene Zozaya’s work operates performatively under the premise that it resignifies the displacement of the sublime by substituting the analog for the digital. And although the technique is not a new proposal, the novelty lies in the attempt to analytically capture the object of sublime nature.

In other words, Mylene Zozaya proposes a symbolic and philosophical way of thinking about the photographic act from a contemporary and technological conceptual framework. Capturing an image does not merely mean clicking a digital device, such as a cellphone; rather, capturing an image is tied to an act of discernment, which arises from pure contemplative understanding. For that reason, it is not the device that generates the sublime act, but rather a conjecture of reflective aesthetic discernment.

If we analyze in detail this aesthetic reflection on the image proposed by Mylene, then photography—regardless of the device or digital mobile used—would lead the image-capturer to engage in a contemplative, reflective act, which (in)consciously transcends immediacy, transforming a simple, automatic, mimetic act into a transcendent one. That is why Milene’s photographic work abstractly reclaims the aesthetic importance of considering that every photographic proposal striving for transcendence must itself be a pure act of understanding, derived from practical reason.

Under this visual rhetoric, we can assert that Mylene Zozaya’s work proposes a novel way of thinking about the landscape.