man & nature # 240 ~ I'm just asking
Tuesday, October 6, 2009 at 10:44AM 
Sunday evening ~ South of Plattsburg • click to embiggenBecause I often get myself all worked up, photography-wise, over the camera club propensity / fetish for making pretty pictures, it has been assumed in some quarters that I am not a fan of beauty, photography-wise. That because I do not, Spinal Tap-wise, turn the Hue & Saturation slider up to 11, that because I do not "chase the light", that because I have never owned/used a GND filter, that because most of my referents are found in / depict the "mundane" or "everyday" world, that I am therefore not a fan of beauty or that I, in fact, reject the notion of beauty in any form.
That assumption is utterly, totally, and completely without merit.
It has also been suggested that my fulminating, re: the pretty picture crowd and their pretty pictures, is nothing more than my creation of a bogeyman / straw man - something to rail against in order to work out some personal problems / demons. Because ... really ... after all, what's the harm in making pictures that bear no resemblance to the real? It's just a form of self-expression / art, is it not?
Well .... I'll grant you the "form of self-expression / art" part (at in the less formal sense re: art) but I will not in anyway accept the notion that making pretty pictures that bear no resemblance to the real - sentimental, romanticized, fanciful "interpretations of the natural world (especially the of grand scenic icons) - is not harmful to the cause of preservation / conservation / appreciation of our natural world.
I find it interesting that most would not accept the retouched Playboy centerfold version of women as representative of real women. Many would even go as far as to say that that fanciful interpretation of women is, in fact and without a doubt, harmful to the reality of real women. That many people are hard pressed if not totally incapable of differentiating the fantasy from the reality - women who want to achieve the "ideal" and men who expect it of "their" women.
The retouched visual version of women - to include how they are depicted in advertising and popular media culture - contributes mightily to the objectification of women - a "thing" to be treated as a tool for one's own purposes, a "thing" that is treated as if lacking in agency or self-determination, a "thing" that is treated as if there is no need to show concern for the 'object's' feelings and experiences.
That said, can someone explain to me how the objectification of the natural world in pictures - representing nature as a fanciful abstraction that is independent of its actual attributes and characteristics - is not as harmful to the understanding and acceptance of the natural world on its own terms as is the visual objectification of women is to the understanding and acceptance of women on their own terms (so to speak)?
Now I am certain that a fair number of pretty picture makers would respond by saying that they are just having fun and that they know the difference between their "interpretations" and the "real thing". Fine. Good for them. But here's the thing - maybe they should just keep their "interpretations" in an archival acid-free storage box under their bed because most of the people they might otherwise show them to are going to accept them as some kind of version or another of the real.
Most of the people they might show the "interpretations" to are going to be hard pressed if not totally incapable of differentiating the fantasy from the reality. And, here's the real problem - the "interpretations" are going to set up an impossibly unrealistic standard / expectation of what is worth preserving, conserving, and appreciating re: the natural world.
These fanciful "interpretations" also serve to provide an emotional / intellectual rationale wherein it doesn't matter if we pave over 90% of the rest of the world because we can always take a vacation and go to insert a National Park name here and see "nature".
That opinion stated, I've taken a hard look around and have not been able to find any bogeymen / straw men. So, I still have to ask - can someone explain to me how the objectification of the natural world in pictures - representing nature as a fanciful abstraction that is independent of its actual attributes and characteristics - is not as harmful to the understanding and acceptance of the natural world on its own terms as is the visual objectification of women is to the understanding and acceptance of women on their own terms (so to speak)?
Reader Comments (5)
It's just as harmful, but nobody cares, and why should they. Most people are morons. They feed on every lie they are served as long as the lie will make them feel better than facing reality. If there is one thing the Jews, Muslims and Christians of this world understood it was that we're all going to hell eventually. Today modernism rules and people have bought into the whole myth of progress - The infantile zeitgeist that we can smartass ourselfs out of every problem instead of dealing with it. Climate change? Who cares? Some scientist will make C02 go away so why bother...
I think that's a pretty apt analogy.
This is a vcery interesting analogy, Mark. Speaking of "pretty" pictures, here is a question for you. Is your disdain with the final image itself (one that bears little or no resemblance to the real world) or is it influenced by the fact that (some) aspects of the photographic process were employed in producing the image? Would you feel differently if someone were to create an equally fanciful rendition/description of nature using painting or writing as the medium of choice?
BTW, I hold the opinion that your photographs are among the most beautiful ones I have seen.
This is an email I got from an Australian friend recently:
Read the following analogy and you will realize the insignificance of carbon dioxide as a weather controller.
Imagine 1 kilometre of atmosphere and we want to get rid of the carbon pollution in it created by human activity. Let's go for a walk along it.
The first 770 metres are Nitrogen.
The next 210 metres are Oxygen.
That's 980 metres of the 1 kilometre. 20 metres to go.
The next 10 metres are water vapour. 10 metres left.
9 metres are argon. Just 1 more metre.
A few gases make up the first bit of that last metre.
The last 38 centimetres of the kilometre - that's carbon dioxide. A bit over one foot.
97% of that is produced by Mother Nature. It’s natural.
Out of our journey of one kilometre, there are just 12 millimetres left. Just over a centimetre - about half an inch.
That’s the amount of carbon dioxide that global human activity puts into the atmosphere.
And of those 12 millimetres Australia puts in .18 of a millimetre.
Less than the thickness of a hair. Out of a kilometre!
As a hair is to a kilometre - so is Australia's contribution to Carbon Pollution.
There are plenty of real pollution problems to worry about. It's hard to imagine that Australia's contribution to carbon dioxide in the world's atmosphere is one of the more pressing ones. And I can't believe that a new tax on everything is the only way to blow that pesky hair away.
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What this has to do with Nature in the USA is tenuous (unless we consider the USA as a great producers of CO2), but I think it's interesting nonetheless.
Going about making pictures reduces the subject spatially (let's leave the temporal dimension out of this) from three to two dimensions. Making a print reduces it even further to an object (with its attendant fetish value) which can be collected, hoarded, shown, otherwise "enjoyed". Nature is only in the background - as provider of all the "stuff" needed to make the picture and the print. Stuff which is refined from Nature and the existence of which degrades Nature further and further - see the mountains garbage we produce. Either we cut back our population and stop mining Nature for all we can or we're bound to follow the Dodo into history, which may not be such a bad thing after all ....
Cheers.
I have never thought of the "pretty pictures" of landscapes with the analogy you gave but it is a fantastic one and it's something I'm going to remember.
I don't particularly like the pretty-picture style of landscape photography, but my own pictures are not what most people see when they look. There's too much color, too much micro contrast, and yet that's the way things look to me when I see something that I want to photograph. The colors are rich and deep and vibrant and the textures just leap off the concrete walls and the wooden fences. Someone looking for reality would say I'm overdoing it, turning the knob up to 11, and yet I'm just trying to make things look on screen the way they did to me when I was there.
My pictures don't look like the pretty pictures but they don't look like the photos that are intended to be documentary, either. I nearly said that they don't look real, but that's not right either because I'm just trying to make my pictures look like what I saw.