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Nature photography
I’ve been poring over the photo catalog the last 48 hours or so, seeing images I’d forgotten, cast back into times I’d left.
Some of the images that say the most to me are the ones I might have thrown away, were I a purist. A blurred glimpse of butterfly speeding across the field of vision as I struggled to follow it with the long lens, the Mojave sun backlighting it into incomprehensibility. Feedlots in evening glow, blurred as I aimed, steadied, and shot one-handed, my other hand on the wheel at 80 mph. A perfect Calochortus with a thick blade of grass in front of it, out of focus.
Elk in a fenced-in side yard, spools and fallen chain link underfoot.
Among the best, in terms of composition: a puma seen from behind, relaxing. To call it a “nature photo” might cause some disagreement. It’s a zoo puma, and while shooting photos of captive animals still requires talent and skill, it’s a lot easier than photographing animals out running around. And on the outside of the zoo walls, when you do find animals, they’re far more likely to be doing something worth documenting. But try getting a shot like the one of that zoo puma, in the wild, with a 50 mm lens. And when you try, be sure to turn the camera’s shutter sound setting to “off.”
The important thing is to be honest about where you caught the image. If it’s a parking lot raven, don’t pretend you stalked a less-habituated gal out in the roadless desert. A few years back, a nature magazine caught hell for splicing a few extra zebras into their herd for their cover photo without saying so. If you’re pretending at documentation, be honest. That kind of purism is mere ethical behavior.
But some nature photo purism is just misguided. It’s not even all that pure…
No man made structures or evidence of human habitation or baiting of wildlife will be accepted… Images need to be stalked in their natural environment, doing their everyday thing…
That’s from an online wildlife photography group’s description of its requirements for accepting images. They also discourage contextual shots, landscapes without charismatic fauna, photos of insects and flower macros. They don’t say so explicitly, but they want dramatic shots of vertebrates, the flashier the better, and in edenic, primal settings. I’m not linking to the group as I don’t mean to pick on any specific people. It’s a common prejudice. And given the context, it’s wholly ludicrous on the face of it. For one thing, the very photograph is a “man made” structure. The fact that we’re even looking at the image of the majestic bighorn sheep at sunset, standing undisturbed in its remote, untrammeled mountain fastnesses, generally means that said mountain fastness is no longer so remote and undisturbed, because if the photographer hadn’t trammelled it the photo wouldn’t exist. I notice that a lot of wildlife photographers tend to favor shots where the animal seems not to have noticed the photographer, thus preserving the illusion that the photographer and camera don’t actually exist. (Wolf shots seem to be an exception to this: photo consumers apparently enjoy making eye contact with wolves.)
I won’t go so far as to call this a lie, though I was close to it for a while today. But it’s certainly a carefully preserved, if not necessarily completely thought out, illusion.
Photos that actually, usefully document wild animal behavior tend not to be artfully posed. Some of the most important such I’ve seen in my work would in no way pass muster with the online group noted above. They were shot at a guzzler, an artificial water source in the desert: in essence, a bait station. The guzzler in question is about half a mile from my field study site on Cima Dome, and Preserve biologists set up a motion-sensitive camera with flash there to record who came by at night to drink. There were coyotes, which is no big surprise. There were Columbian black-tailed deer, whose tracks I’d seen in wet sand, so I knew they were there, but it was nice to have confirmation that I hadn’t misread the sign.
And there were a couple shots of pumas, which I’d known were reputed to spend time in the area, but of which I had literally seen neither hide nor hair.
The puma shots were artless, printed on cheap laser paper at low resolution in garish colors and were largely characterized by bright tapetum glare, and they were some of the most exciting wildlife photography I have seen.
There are artful shots that convey a wealth of information, don’t get me wrong. Those magnificent images that show up every now and again of Churchill, Manitoba polar bears playing with sled dogs come to mind. And I’m as pleased when I catch an image of an unsuspecting wild animal, unaware of my presence and uninhibited, as the next guy. I do think that I’d feel almost as good about it if I forgot to remove the lens cap: the joy is mainly in the seeing, and a pallid photographic reproduction of the experience is good mainly for nostalgia and for bragging rights. And I have to admit that images where the animal is acknowledging my existence, as this coyote did, just feel more authentic to me, more honest.
But the worst of it, the worst of the definition of “wild nature” in the photo guidelines quoted above, is that that definition relies on outmoded and dangerous assumptions about the interrelationships of humans and the rest of nature.
What part of California, for instance, is devoid of the signs of human habitation? Of the wild oats and mustard sown by colonizers, or the ozone haze Angelenos spume out to cloak the desert mountains? If I caught and preserved a glimpse of a jaguar in the Algodones Dunes, would the resulting image be any less stirring and important for the nearby ATV tire tracks? Forests in the Sierra Nevada are either well-spaced and parklike results of native people’s burns, or thick-grown doghair thickets resulting from a century of fire suppression, or ghost forests due to climate-augmented bark beetle infestations, or clearcuts. The desert has been cowburnt to within an inch of its life, or sheep-burnt closer than that. Even if you do find a part of the landscape that is not palpably affected by human activity, that lack of effect is itself a notable commentary on human activity.
And yet purist nature photographers like the ones making those above-quoted rules would put forth images of an Earth carefully of bulldozers and styrofoam cups and duck blinds, and maintain that that is proper nature documentary.
Maybe I will call it lying after all.
It’s pornography, plain and simple: pretty animal pictures meant to titillate, the images carrying, like literal pornography, a host of implied false lessons about the lives and essences of their subjects.
Also, like a lot of literal pornography, it can be kind of boring. I got a lot of shots of that Yosemite coyote in November, standing prettily in the dead grass of Tuolumne Meadows, looking one way and the other, wind riffling its thick patchy coat. The photos’ composition was OK, the colors lovely, and I’m a big fan of coyotes, so I sure don’t mind having images of them to look at. But of all the photos that coyote suffered through my taking, there were five that carried the most useful and interesting information, that said the most about what it’s like to be a coyote in Tuolumne Meadows, and none of them are eligible for acceptance by that online photo group:
Coyote looks both ways even though the road is quiet. It can get busy in season, and she crosses it enough to know to look both ways. It’s a bit of learning about making your way as a non-human in a world increasingly given over to humans, and to my mind worth a thousand calendar fodder images.
Posted by: Chris Clarke
Note: A database glitch in 2008 ate a bunch of archived comments. Don't be offended if yours isn't here, or confused if the conversation seems disjointed. Thanks!
If you have the time sometime, have a look at my blog. I’ve also talked of many of these issues before. It was kind of nice coming across someone else who’s as frustrated at this arbitrariness of the division between the natural and manmade.
I’ll just paste the links to two posts here:
http://natashamhatre.blogspot.com/2007/11/ideals-and-polemics.html
http://natashamhatre.blogspot.com/2005/11/change-and-stasis.html
By: By Natasha on 2008 01 29
Great posts, Natasha.
And your work on RedBubble is absolutely stunning.
By: By Chris Clarke on 2008 01 29
Chris, I agree: those coyote shots are the very sort of wildlife photo we need to be filling the nature magazines with. The second in particular is one I would’ve been very pleased with had I taken it, and would post to my photoblog without hesitation.
I’m interested in a more experimental kind of nature photography that not only doesn’t exclude the human, but tries to engage the viewer in a different way: with shots like this or this, for example. When crafting my artist’s statement the other week, I also referred to “nature porn” — a common enough reaction among us eco-cranks, I guess.
By: By Dave on 2008 01 30
Thanks, Chris.
By: By Natasha on 2008 01 30
Wonderful commentary. In some ways it reminds me of visiting a zoo; we’re supposed to concentrate on the framed “charismatic megafauna” and the squirrel doing interesting things in the tree nearby should be ignored. As someone who does most of her “nature photography” in urban or suburban environments, and of animals and plants that are human-adapted enough that I can get close shots of them without telephoto lenses, I find the notion that “good” “nature photography” can consist of only the dramatic, “pristine,” and far away troubling.
Among other things it reinforces the notion that Nature is something Out There (rather than integral to our lives, even when we’re sitting on the couch at home, staring at a screen). It also reinscribes the idea that humans are Unnatural, and that any human element must be ruthlessly excised if Nature is to be preserved - even preserved on film.
This insistence on this false dichotomy makes it impossible for us to make sense of the ecoscapes that the majority of us inhabit - these weird, broken, hodge-podgy mixtures of culture and built environment and the nonhuman elements that persist, survive, and even thrive here along with us human animals.
It also blinds us to the fact that not all such mixed ecoscapes are undesirable, and that different ecoscapes may be more or less desirable. If Human-built = Bad, then we are unable to intelligently choose between environments in which wildlife habitat and human habitation can coexist in a manner beneficial to the health and diversity of both populations, and environments in which both human and nonhuman animals live impoverished, damaged, and unhealthy lives.
My students and I were talking a bit about this today, in the context of wilderness management and the “problem” of indigenous populations that coexist within and contribute to the health and biodiversity of various threatened habitats. Those who insist on defining Nature as untouched by human influence will find nothing to photograph, not in this age of global climate change; those who insist on seeing Human as Bad are unable to envision any future that allows the mutally beneficial coexistence of human beings and the nonhuman world.
Indeed, some environments would not be as interesting and dynamic as they are in the absence of human intervention. Many of our “wild” environments are in fact impoverished “widowed lands” compared to their earlier forms, when human involvement was a keystone of their ecosystems. (I’m thinking of Hogue and Anza Borrego here.)
These sorts photographs are like porn: they present an unrealistic view of what can be a wonderful and mutually beneficial relationship, reducing it down to something that insults and damages both sides. And, like porn, it depends on the invisible presence of a complicit photographer, and a viewer who is willing to suspend his or her disbelief in order to enjoy this fantasy without real-world consequences.
(And yet, I must admit, I enjoy looking at “nature photography.” My intellectual disdain doesn’t effectively dissuade my animal pleasure in seeing dramatic landscapes and nonhuman creatures. It must be hardwired, like the desire for sex…)
By: By Rachel Shaw on 2008 01 31
Rana, thanks for spelling out the connection between those kinds of photos and actual porn. That’s exactly what I meant, but wasn’t able to articulate.
By: By Dave on 2008 01 31
I’ve been impressed by some of the images your fellow Californians are getting with scout cameras, such as this one: http://cameratrapcodger.blogspot.com .
There is a fun quality of serendipity to playing with one of those.
When I was in grad school at CU-Boulder, a friend took me to a meeting of a nature-photography club that had similar rules—no sign of human activity, etc. I reacted much the same as you did.
By: By Chas S. Clifton on 2008 02 01
I ride a mountain bike. I kept encountering animals, so I started carrying a camera with me. First, a small snapshot camera. Later, a larger near-SLR camera with a powerful zoom lens.
Now, I always ride with a camera, and taking pictures is a key part of my riding.
But I don’t stalk any animals, and I have not yet ridden over territory without signs of some human activity. The photographer is present, if out of frame, after all!
Sometimes, in open space right in the middle of suburbia, the only way I’ve noticed coyotes on the California hillsides is in a photo I’ve taken. They get camouflage! ;-p
By: By Pitch313 on 2008 02 02
Rana said exactly what I was thinking. There’s this whole “nature iz wiiiild” thinking that still pervades as leftovers from the conservation movement.
Your shots are really neat though! What’s more interesting than seeing pictures of bugs, fungi, or flowers? I always thought that was nature - the will of plants to poke out of cement.
The best photograph I ever shot myself was of three toads sitting on top of each other in a tree outside of a house. The things that pop up in people’s backyards…
By: By Meep on 2008 02 06
I always thought that was nature - the will of plants to poke out of cement.
I love this.
By: By Rachel Shaw on 2008 02 07
