ku # 672 ~ idiots, one and all
Wednesday, February 17, 2010 at 07:49PM 
Nature is chaotic ~ in the Adirondack PARK, NY • click to embiggenAnd I quote:
Let's face it—Nature is chaotic. Nothing seems to happen with any order or reason. Most scenes are a jumble of elements, competing with each other for attention. The single greatest challenge for the nature photographer is finding a way to tame the chaos, and to impose a sense of order.
While paying a visit to an online nature photography site to see if the shit had hit the fan re: the exhibit Bird Watching - an exhibition of bird pictures by Paula McCartney, I came across the preceding statement. It was part of a teaser for an online nature photography workshop offered under the title of MAKING WOW! IMAGES -Six Steps to Taking Great Nature Photographs.
However, let me address first things first, the shit hitting the fan thing. A few years ago, I stirred up quite a dust up at the nature site when I began posting images in the fauna gallery of decayed flowers that were made on my flatbed scanner (so called, scanner photography). The fauna moderators / police went ballistic because they were judged to be a "slap in the face" to all of the hardworking fauna shooters who trek out into the field toting all kinds of specialized gear - reflectors, diffuser screens, wind screens, flash equipment, and so on.
There was quite a heated debate amongst myself, the moderators, and the site owner as to whether such images should be allowed to be posted. Long story, short - the pictures were allowed and in very short order the moderators and a few of the fauna "purists" headed for the hills and started their own site, where, I presume, no such grievous affronts to fauna picture making purity are allowed.
In any event, I have to think that if word of McCartney's pictures should come to the attention of the avian picturing purists - which is probably a long shot at best, because McCartney's pictures of artificial birds in natural environments are definitely part of the Art milieu which is a place not often frequented by avian picture makers - there will be a hew and cry along the lines of that in the fauna gallery. I am certain that part of that clamor will be about why-the-hell would anyone pay that kind of money for fake bird pictures?
All of which brings me to the dumb-ass statement about the "greatest single challenge" for the nature photographer - that of imposing order on the chaotic natural world.
As you can deduce from the sub-title - six steps to taking great nature photographs - the nature photography expert believes that there are 6 steps to taking (not making) great pictures. Great pictures are, of course, WOW! pictures. Right from the start, it is well worth noting that amongst those 6 key ingredients, there is not a single mention of the heart, soul, and mind of the picture maker.
But, what really got me going was the fact that, in the real world, even though the natural world is full of chaos, one should avoid picturing that chaos. Instead, one should impose a form of human "order" upon that natural world in order to make it more appealing - much easier, in a visual sense, to grasp and ultimately to consume.
And isn't that exactly what we're doing in and to the natural world - imposing a form of human "order" upon it in an attempt to make it easier to consume?
And, BTW & IMO, Paula McCartney's pictures are beautiful looks at the chaos of the natural world and pictures that call into consideration / contemplation humankind's relationship to it.
FYI - stay tuned, in the next entry I'll have more to say on the moronic idea that in the natural world "[N]othing seems to happen with any order or reason. Most scenes are a jumble of elements, competing with each other for attention."
Reader Comments (10)
I'll be curious to see where you go with this. I think the criticism regarding the six steps and WOW! images is spot on, but I would be less critical of the desire to impose human order on nature. Chaos, too, is a human order which we impose when we think and talk about nature. Without imposing some sort of human order on nature, I'm not sure what it even means to try to understand the world.
Mark M: But why do we have to "understand" the world? The path to awareness, sustainability — a future — is that unknown, that fuzzy mythical space that guides what we know and see. We need that space. We need gaps. We need uncertainty. There are things, that for our own sanity and the fate of our species, that we need to not comprehend or understand. If the environment — and I use this term in the most broad sense imaginable, containing every possible place a human could stand, from the corner of a parking lot to a virgin wilderness — is not one of these gaps, what hope do we have?
Mark this is an interesting set of questions. Recently I got to think that the idea to impose an order, even a pictorial one, has a lot to do with the way we approach the world and interact with it, even consume it. Some Anthropologist have pointed out how the obsession for an existing order is all Westerner. But the idea to impose a vision, or better a look and hence an order to nature goes beyond into the sphere of gender, but this is truly a muddy field.
As for artificial birds (btw did you know that in Italy the word "bird" is also used metaphorically to denote the penis ?) I'd like to point you, if you haven't already seen it, to this one that is even more extreme http://www.unrealnature.com/OnStage_thumbs.htm
Toy birdies in the bushes! How cute! I do like the $800 price tag. Time to get out there with the old rubber duck....
Well, a fake bird shown in the environment the bird lives in is interesting to me.
It seems like a lot of 'purists' strongly dislike any evidence of trees in bird pictures.
The birds on stage is hysterical. And there are more sets to consider as well. I didn't see any discuss of her intent, which I curious about. Also I would love to see something about her methods.
As far as the Six steps... There is a great market for rules or methods that lead to good pictures. This aligns with the path that many folks take in arriving at photography. Frankly, no art experience: be that some kind of training or education (and not necessarily formal). I think this leads to an approach that mimics "good" art. Plus a desire for certainty: 'if I follow this approach, I know I'll get good results'.
Re: Bird Watching
How do we know the birds are fake? Also I'm not sure to think of set either.
I saw those bird pictures a year or two ago and thought they were beautiful (still do). But they are art, not nature photography. No, birders won't be amused.
Nature is chaos, but to me it is beautiful. There is no taming it or imposing order (and who would define what order is anyway). Through my own work I try to show that the chaos is beautiful, nature in its raw form is beautiful. I would not want to impose order in any way. There may be patterns or some sense of structure, but no order. Chaos is beautiful if we look carefully enough.
Matt, I actually think we're on the same page here, except you are suggesting that by 'understand' I meant 'understand completely' or to remove uncertainty. To clarify, what I meant was that there is no understanding at all without imposing order. Before we even get a chance to think about the world, we have to perceive it and that very act of perception imposes order on the world. It is inescapable. We are set in a sea of atoms and energy buzzing around everywhere and to make sense of any of it, to 'understand' any of it, we impose some sort of order, even if that is recognizing it as chaos.
I would say that play between perception and the world is one of the things that makes photography so interesting.
see the series "Order from Chaos' by Robert Glenn Ketchum or almost any of Eliot Porter's in-close landscapes.