I think I’ve said this before, but if there are any Creek readers who haven’t followed the “homepage” links in Anne’s extremely kind comments, check out her blog now. If you’re anything like me, you’ll make it a habit.
Anne is an incredibly gifted wildlife photographer, with a heartbreaking empathy for her subjects. Her August 13 coyote is especially charming, capturing the soul of the species.
There is danger in this kind of photography. One runs the risk of anthropomorphizing the wildlife being portrayed, of glamorizing the beautiful and furred at the risk of missing said wildlife’s true character. Assuming we can know what that true character is.
I wrote a piece a few years back in which I described the impact of the Disney Corporation on our perceptions of nature. There’s a passage from that piece that I think applies to much wildlife photography, though I wrote it about filmmaking in particular:
Film editors quail at the hours of inactivity that characterize the natural world; a two-hour film may show enough vigorous activity to fill a year of an animal’s actual life. Gone are the endless hours of silence, the slow changes in sky and light, the arduous and heavy-laden progress along a steep trail, that characterize much of the true wilderness experience. Seasons cycle in less time than it takes to get to the bottom of your popcorn bag. The complex and interwoven rhythm of nature, plain to those who spend more than a few rushed days outside of cities, is lost, replaced by rhythms measured in frames per second.
Unless some filmmaker adopts Andy Warhol as a major influence, nature documentary isn’t likely to escape this limitation. But by modelling its attractions after its nature films, Disney extends this distortion of nature’s rhythms into what most take for real life. On the [Disneyland] mine train, you can get from Arizona to Wyoming in five minutes. On the [also in Disneyland] Jungle Cruise, you find predator after large predator leaping out from behind the cramped foliage. Even if you simply measure your four-mile Florida hike by the distance between interpretive signs, you’re experiencing nature that has been strapped to the procrustean bed of industrial time.
What happens when people accustomed to this industrial nature are faced with a natural environment in unenhanced form? Where seasons change at the traditional pace, flowers don’t open in time-lapse and the animals mostly hide or run away before you can see them? By comparison to nature in its disneyfied state, the simple swamp or desert valley floor will seem a flaccid, lifeless thing, its resident wildlife uninteresting and devoid of musical accompaniment, certainly of less value than the proposed shopping mall or airport. There’s no nature there: nature is bears and big snakes and rams duelling to the Anvil Chorus. Who could thus oppose a Disney-style development in which a few of the original plants would be preserved and labelled for our enjoyment?
The thing I especially like about Anne’s work is that while she does publish an extraordinary collection of sublime megafaunal portraits, she pays heed to the inconspicuous as well. A harebell here, a dried stem of everlasting there, mist weaving through aspens and dissolving. Wolves and bears and ungulates command our attention, but they make up only a minuscule portion of the biomass of the Yellowstone that Anne loves so.
