A few years ago, I was standing in front of St. Stephen’s Cathedral in Vienna with a group of friends. We had intended to stop briefly, take a look, and continue on our way. Ninety minutes later, we were still standing there. Not because the cathedral is particularly large, nor because there were so many historical facts to discuss. Eventually, my wife had to remind me that we had a dinner reservation. The reason for the delay was quite different. The cathedral had begun to speak.
What most visitors see as an impressive building often appears to me as a text. A text composed of stone, colour, proportion, figures, and symbols. Those who know its language discover layers of meaning that extend far beyond architecture. I encounter this experience again and again, whether in Vienna or in Umbria. People look at a symbol they may have passed for years without noticing. Then they learn something about its meaning, and suddenly their perception changes. An ornament becomes a message. A decorative detail becomes a thought. For a brief moment, a forgotten language seems audible once more.
Perhaps this is one of the reasons why the Symbolist movement of the late nineteenth century fascinates me so deeply. By the time Symbolism emerged, Europe had already travelled a long road. The Enlightenment had placed reason at the centre of human understanding. Science explained the world with increasing precision. Industrialisation transformed everyday life at a pace previously unimaginable. Railways, electricity, photography, and modern technology seemed capable of answering every question. Art had responded to these developments in its own ways. Realism depicted the world as it was. Impressionism depicted the world as it appeared. Yet for some artists, this was no longer enough.
The Symbolists asked a different question. They were less interested in how the world looked than in what it meant. A tree was no longer merely a tree. A rose was more than a flower. Water was more than a physical substance. Everything could become the bearer of an experience that resisted direct representation. Loneliness, longing, memory, mortality, fear, hope, or the mystery of existence itself could all find expression through symbolic forms. This is why islands, mirrors, ruins, forests, waterscapes, masks, and dreamlike landscapes populate so many Symbolist works. Their aim was not to tell stories or describe reality. They sought to evoke states of mind and emotional resonances. Their images were meant to be experienced before they were understood.
The longer I reflect on Symbolism, the more it appears to me as one of Europe’s last great attempts to preserve a fading way of seeing. For centuries, the world was not only visible; it was readable. Churches, cities, gardens, and even ordinary objects were filled with meaning. Animals, plants, colours, and geometric forms formed a symbolic language understood by large parts of society. A lion was not merely an animal. A spring was not merely water. A garden was not merely cultivated land. People inhabited a world woven from signs that helped them understand both reality and their place within it.
Today, our relationship with images has changed profoundly. Never before have so many images been created. Never before have they been so technically perfect. At the same time, our ability to read images as carriers of meaning seems to be diminishing. We see more than any generation before us. But do we understand more?
This question has occupied me for many years, not only as a photographer but also through my interest in symbolism. Anyone who spends enough time studying comparative symbolism encounters a remarkable phenomenon. Certain forms, images, and motifs appear repeatedly across cultures. Water, trees, caves, mountains, circles, serpents, roses, and diamonds emerge in societies that had little or no contact with one another. Explanations differ. Some scholars point to archetypal structures of human consciousness. Others emphasise shared human experiences that naturally give rise to similar symbolic forms. Whatever explanation one prefers, the observation itself remains striking.
Certain symbols seem to be understood long before they are explained.
Perhaps this is their greatest strength. Most people today know little about the symbolic traditions associated with water. They know nothing of sacred springs as thresholds between worlds, of rivers that separate life from death, or of the countless traditions linking water to transformation, femininity, birth, and renewal. Yet many still experience something profound when standing before a silent lake or the open sea. The cultural interpretation may have faded. The experience remains.
The same can be said of many other symbols. They survive not because their meanings are consciously preserved, but because the human experiences from which they emerged continue to exist. Symbols speak to something deeper than knowledge.
Their mode of operation is unusual. Symbols rarely address the analytical mind directly. Instead, they bring into resonance a layer of experience beneath conscious interpretation. Long before we begin analysing an image according to composition, lighting, or formal structure, we have often already responded to it emotionally. Something attracts us, disturbs us, fascinates us, or refuses to let go. Perhaps the true power of a symbol lies precisely here. It creates resonance before it creates understanding. It functions less like a definition than like a tuning fork, setting something within us into motion.
The longer I think about it, the less a symbol appears to me as a coded message. A symbol is not an equation. Water does not simply mean emotion. A rose does not simply mean love. A diamond does not simply mean femininity. Genuine symbols open fields of meaning rather than closing them. They gather experiences, memories, and associations into forms that contain more than language can adequately express. This may explain why symbols remain alive within art. Their significance does not depend on intellectual knowledge. They speak to experiences that precede explanation.
This brings me to a question that concerns me as a photographer. How can images still affect us when the symbolic language that once informed them has largely been forgotten? By all logic, many works should fail. If an image only functioned when its symbolism was consciously understood, vast portions of art history would have become inaccessible. No one would be moved by a Gothic cathedral. No one would pause before Böcklin’s Isle of the Dead. No one would feel the presence of a medieval fresco. Yet the opposite is true.
Perhaps this is why I do not seek symbols in the narrow sense when creating photographs. What I seek is a certain force that some images possess. At a certain point during the editing process, the question is no longer whether a photograph is technically successful. The real question becomes: Does it carry something? Is there a presence within it? Does it possess that difficult-to-describe quality that draws me in immediately, while other images remain strangely empty despite their technical perfection?
This may also explain why symbols continue to interest me. Not because I wish to illustrate their meanings, but because they have served as vessels of human experience for thousands of years. The Sheela-na-gig, the rose, writing upon the body, light and shadow, or the motifs within my Elementa series do not interest me as historical quotations. They interest me as condensations of experience. They point toward something larger than any single explanation.
Perhaps this is the enduring relevance of Symbolism. Its artists did not seek to explain the world. They sought to open spaces within it. They wanted to create images that continued to resonate long after they had been seen. Images that touched something before they were understood. Perhaps this remains true today.
Meaning does not create impact.
Perhaps impact awakens the desire for meaning.
And perhaps the task of art is neither to reproduce the world nor to explain it. Perhaps its task is to make something readable again that we believed we already knew. Symbols may not be answers from a forgotten past. They may be traces of human experience that continue to exist beneath the surface of conscious thought. Perhaps that is why they still speak to us, even when we no longer remember their language.is Vice versa. Maybe the effect arouses the need for meaning.
And, perhaps, the task of art is not to portray the world or to explain. Maybe it is to make something readable again, that we thought we knew for a long time. Perhaps icons are no responses from a bygone time. Maybe you are traces of human experiences, which are up to today. Experiences that are below the intellect, and yet to be understood. Maybe that’s why they still speak to us, even if we have to forget your language for a long time.