Originally Posted by Struan Gray
I find a chilling similarity in the two quotes above, and have often felt such a response myself.
To some LF photographers, a beloved landscape that dies will awaken new aesthetic impulses. In others, it might provoke a more social (or activist) impulse that competes with – and sometimes overshadows – the aesthetic one.
The best photographers, I think, are pushed and pulled in both directions.
Minnesota is experiencing a plague of ash borers this year.
Kirk: thanks.
Heroique: I have always loved that joke, and variants thereof, but I don't see the connection, certainly not a "chilling similarity". Perhaps because I know what I mean to say :-)
In particular that joke plays upon the callousness of a particular stereotype of photographer, who regards the photograph (and the sale of the photograph) as more important than the thing photographed. That's not me.
In fact, it is precisely because I associate a search for undamaged pristine nature with a head-in-the-sand failure to care about the real world around us that I don't want only to photograph the conventional beautiful views. For me, doing so is a way of not looking, and of treating the landscape as mere background material for a heartwarming fireside fairy tale. For me, willingly-blind sentimentality is an even worse crime than cynicism.
I also associate the conventional beautiful views with an acceptance of a narrowly-defined corporatised definition of beauty. So, even if you want to restrict your photography to the beautiful and uplifting, I feel you should develop your own definitions of beauty and uplift.
I agree with the rest of what you say.
yes, they are being developed in the large agri-business genetic labs as we speak, only immune to small spectrum of illnesses as that will allow for a future upgrade market, needless to say the seeds have an inbuilt suicide gene.
(Struan: I also agree with most of what you say, except what’s still unmentioned about “looking.” A dying landscape – not the “corporatized” or “conventional” one, but the one that shares a concrete and small-scale relationship with you – can motivate a photographer to drop his or her camera in the interest of “looking,” especially when there may be a “wrong” or injustice to address. Sometimes, cameras and film do get in the way. I didn’t mean to imply that since you didn’t mention this response, you were unaware of it.)
Here’s another late image to help illustrate the Montana scene of the earliest post. This is the male three-toed woodpecker whose hunting I describe in post #23, and whose habitat is seen in post #25. It lives with its companion near my beloved Whitebark Pine, recently killed by the beetles. Note the larvae in its mandible! The beetles that survived the woodpecker’s predation have now emerged as adults in numbers similar to last year, according to Dillon, Montana natives and the local NF office. A cold snap this winter is sorely needed, they say…
(Small format)
Nikon N90s, 300mm/4.5 AIS ED-IF w/ TC-16a, SB-80dx fill flash, Provia 100-F, 1/125th @ f/5.6.
Everything is cyclical, including the parasitic infections that plague the species of this planet. The trees and our photo subjects will recover.
That said, the statistics indicate it is our turn. Due to the highest populations and population densities in human history I'd expect it to be much worse than predicted. This eventuality should make for some interesting photography - similar to that which took place during the Great Depression and the America Civil War.
I live on 20 acres of forest land 1/2 way between Billings and Yellowstone Park. Drought has weakened a lot of the Ponderosa pine and the beetles finished them off. Over the last decade, fires have destroyed quite a bit of forest land out west because of the drought condition and dead standing timber. I almost consider a lot of my photos I took 10-25 yrs ago historic because they show a lot of areas in AZ, CO, WY, and MT before they burned.
I agree entirely. It is all too easy to tell yourself that by documenting a tragedy you have done something about it. You have, but perhaps you could have done more with other tools.
Some change really is cyclical, and on the timescale of human lives. One of my dream projects would be to photograph the fir waves in the White Mountains of New Hampshire, where the wind cyclically kills sixty-year old balsam firs while saplings grow up in their lee. The patterns are spatial as well as temporal, and you can literally step though the life cycle of the trees.
I don't think that many of the wider changes we are seeing are like that though. Some are 'natural', like the slow heaving of the released bedrock after the retreat of ice-age glaciers: my house is still rising by half a millimeter or so year because of what happened ten thousand years ago. When events happen on this timescale, they are effectively permanent to humans and societies. However, we can and do affect how the local ecology adapts to such unavoidable change, and often in ways which are non-obvious.
Climate change is one such mechanism which is a current hot buzzword. Nitrophication, which I mentioned earlier, is another. A third, which particularly saddens the romantic in me, is the fractional distillation of bioactive pollutants like PCBs up through the latitudes to the polar regions. Sweden, where I live, is not immune, despite its squeaky clean environmental image. The dogs mercury and other traditional plants in my local woods are facing intense grazing pressure from an Iberian slug that would not normally survive our winters. The oaks I showed in my picture would normally shade out competitors, but the maples and ashes can use the extra nitrogen in the groundwater to grow up through the oak's branches. Further north, fatty fish from the Gulf of Bothnia are not recommended eating for anyone planning to have children - thanks to the mining and forestry industries.
I don't believe such issues are absolute moral ones. I do believe that it is wrong to willfully destroy something, or to allow supposedly natural processes to take the blame for what is at root a human agency. This part of Sweden suffered a man-made impoverishment of the landscape three hundred years ago, and my children are the poorer for it: they have no experience of the big old trees that I loved to play in when growing up in Southern England. I believe that we as a species are currently inflicting far less subtle impoverishments on our descendants.
The professionals, the ecologists, botanists and park service personnel already know this stuff - at least, here they do - and are implementing action plans and care strategies and development zoning to try and preserve and protect what diversity is left. But there is still a strong dislocation between their activity and public perceptions of 'nature'. I lay part of the blame on Disneyfied nature films and pretty-picture calenders, both of which tend to absolve people of both thought and responsibility.
This has got a bit long. As you can probably tell, I'm currently thinking a lot about how to present my photographs of dead elms and invasive weeds to a wider audience. I would like my photography to raise these issues, and to persuade people that it is worth their while taking an active interest in them. We'll see.
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