civilized ku # 485 ~ eye see nothing / closed

Highway embankment • click to embiggenIn hockey parlance, the phrase "cherry picker" is used in a rather derisive manner to describe a player who is a one-way player who simply waits for a pass near center ice in the hopes of getting a breakaway instead of helping on defense. He’s a no talent cherry picker who gets all his scoring chances by waiting outside the defensive zone play for a breakaway. In non-sport parlance, a cherry picker could be someone who specializing in plucking low-hanging fruit - to pick a target that is easy to achieve - as in, pick the low-hanging fruit first by identifying the most obvious opportunities.

I mention these concepts because, in response to my statement - re: I can't help feeling that there is a rather direct connection between the addiction to making / viewing pretty pictures and the eye-see-nothing aversion to seeing the real-world mess that constitutes so much of everyday life, it has been suggested that many pretty picture makers, in the opinion of Tom Frost, have been / are "staunch conservationists, who very much recognized the mess we have created, and who worked tirelessly throughout (their) life to help ameliorate that mess."

In Tom's opinion, one such picture maker is Robert Glenn Ketchum.

IMO, Ketchum is a picture making cherry picker who specializes in plucking low-hanging fruit*.

CAVEAT: To be certain, there can be no doubt that RGK has had an impact on things environmentalism / conservationism. However ...

... virtually all of his work in that area has been that of trying to protect / trying to create set-asides along the lines of the National Park mindset - a mindset that was suppose to create and foster in the minds of all the John Q. Publics an appreciation for the natural world which would lead to a conservation consciousness that would save the planet.

Well, as is evidenced by looking at our world with eyes wide open, that mindset has created some very spectacular set asides but it has done little or nothing towards creating a meaningful conservation consciousness that would save the planet. In fact, IMO and that of many others, the set-aside, national park mindset has worked against the fostering of the very conservation consciousness that it was supposed to create.

At its root, the set-aside concept promotes the idea that only the grand and spectacular part of the natural world is worthy of getting all worked up over. All the rest is just fodder for human economic development and exploitation. That little pocket wetland / habitat that stands in the way of the ever-expanding machine of progress? Fuck it. Who cares. Hell, who'll even notice when it's gone?

It should be said that I am quite willing to grant that some people have been motivated by pretty pictures of the natural world to try to save some "little pockets" of it that ain't so grand and glorious. But, the simple, undeniable reality is that battle has been overlooked and overshadowed by the battle to save/protect/create the grand and glorious set-asides. And, IMO, a rather large part of that unfortunate dichotomy / disparity of consciousness and effort has to be put squarely at the feet of the pretty picture crowd - both those who create it and those who worship it.

*simply stated, it doesn't take a picture making genius / creative thinker to travel to grand and glorious far away places and make pretty pictures of pretty landscapes. As a mater of fact, IMO, it doesn't get any easier than that. Kinda like shooting fish in a barrel, or, say, plucking low-hanging fruit.

Comments

[Matt]

Have you read End Game by Derek Jensen? If not, I think you would really enjoy it.

[Mike C]

Add to the list of pretty pictures that do not move me: Galen Rowell, aka Mr. Saturation. He was a good mountain climber though.

[Mark M]

Ketchum isn't really spending a lot of time in what I would call the photography repertoire spots—you won't see a Half Dome or Delicate Arch shot from him. Since he spends a lot of time advocating for Alaskan causes, he will capture a fair amount of what might be called grandeur (you can't throw a stick around here without something grand getting in the way) but a lot of the subjects he's shooting, especially in Southwest Alaska might rightly be called swampland by people who don't know better. They're mosquito-infested wetlands and although his photos are pretty, it's not exactly low-hanging fruit. The beauty of SW Alaska isn't obvious to everyone. Also, he's doing this to make a point about how important water resources are in an area where they are trying to build a gigantic mine. He's got a pretty focused agenda lately. This isn't advocating for a set-aside untrammeled by man, but rather, it is showing the landscape that a lot of people depend on for their livelihoods. You might argue against the aesthetic he is espousing aimed at creating an emotional response, but he's been quite successful at raising awareness of real issues—not just promoting a generic 19th century awe.

I also think your criticism is slightly misplaced regarding the set aside mentality. While setting aside the spectacular as a tourist destination may have been the primary motivation in the beginning, it ended up creating a pretty dramatic paradigm shift in the way we think of the land. We've redefined what is considered spectacular. Death Valley wasn't considered spectacular—it was considered a waste land—we learned it was spectacular. If you take a survey of designated wilderness areas you will find a lot of places like the Great Swamp NWR in New Jersey or the Little Lake Creek Wilderness in Texas. These places and many, many set asides like them are anything but spectacular in the typical way. They're only spectacular when you look closely at them and that's the kind of shift the set aside encourages. Now, if you look at the units of park system that get the most attention from photographers, you might come away with idea that it's all spires, granite faces, and sunsets, but just because photographers ignore the less obvious areas doesn't mean they don't exist or that the idea of set asides is bad.

If you want to be critical of set asides I think you would do better to focus on the idea they foster that creating little islands of conservation is enough—that wilderness and human impacts will happily adhere to the lines on the map while we tear the neighboring land apart. It encourages the idea that you can protect an ecosystem by drawing a line around it. We're about to see how well that works in the Gulf of Mexico where the press will talk about the disastrous impact of drilling policy, without drawing the connection between the disaster and the way we live, the way we build car-dependent infrastructure, the way we manufacture a disposable, plastic economy. It's all connected—there are lakes up here in Alaska, for instance, in the heart of huge wilderness areas with very high mercury content from power plants in different countries. I don't think this thinking is caused by any dichotomy between grand vs overlooked land, but the much simpler problem that we don't recognize the impacts of our everyday choices and the economic problem of discounting future costs. Pretty pictures may be ineffectual against these problems, but they don't cause them—I don't even think they encourage them.