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“Take Only Photographs”: by Matthew Brower
© 2005 |
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1. The conception of nature as a space from which humans must be excluded is influenced by the myth of the Garden of Eden. The myth positions nature as innocent and humans as guilty and fallen. Thus their entry into nature is corrupting. On the political implications of this myth see Donna Haraway, “A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology, and Socialist Feminism in the 1980s,” in The Haraway Reader (New York: Routledge, 2004), 7-45. 2. For an argument against this contemporary understanding of nature, which also acknowledges its seductive appeal, see William Cronon, “The Trouble with Wilderness, or, Getting Back to the Wrong Nature,” in Uncommon Ground: Toward Reinventing Nature, ed. William Cronon (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, Inc., 1995), 69-90. 3. John Berger, “Why Look at Animals?” in About Looking (New York: Pantheon, 1980), 1-26. 6. The logic of animal imagery discussed by Berger parallels the logic of the spectacle articulated by Guy Debord in The Society of the Spectacle. The spectacle offers a commodified image in the place of a now inaccessible real relation. Guy Debord, The Society of the Spectacle (Detroit: Red and Black Books, 1977). 7. Haraway, “A Cyborg Manifesto.” 8. Jonathan Burt. Animals in Film. (London: Reaktion Books, 2002), 30. 11. Bill McKibben, “Curbing Nature’s Paparazzi,” Harper’s, 295.1770 Nov. 1997, 19-24. See also Nature Photography: A Focus on the Issues, ed. Peter Friederici (Jamestown, NY: Roger Tory Peterson Institute of Natural History, 1993). 12. James Elkins, The Object Stares Back: On the Nature of Seeing (San Diego: Harcourt, 1996), 33. 14. Derek Bousé has suggested that such behavior stems from the inappropriate conception of animals promulgated by wildlife representations. Derek Bousé, “False Intimacy: Close-ups and Viewer Involvement in Wildlife Film,” Visual Studies, 18.2, 2003, 123-132. 15. The epigram is by Thomas Hood. 16. On Llewelyn’s family history see David Painting “J. D. Llewelyn and his Family Circle,” History of Photography, 15.3 autumn 1991, 180-185. On Llewelyn’s photography see Richard Morris John Dillwyn Llewelyn, 1810-1882: The First Photographer in Wales (Cardiff: Welsh Arts Council, 1980). 17. On the history of the estate see Richard Morris, Penllergare - A Victorian Paradise (Friends of Penllergare, 1999). 18. On the temporality of the wildlife photograph see Berger, “Why Look at Animals?” 19. Estelle Jussim and Elizabeth Lindquist-Cock, Landscape as Photograph (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1985), 31. Jussim and Lindquist-Cock also suggest that this reading may be the result of “some intense human desire typical of the alienated, overcrowded twentieth century,” implying that, at the very least, a particular kind of historical consciousness is necessary for such a reading. 20. On deep time and its relation to visual representation see Martin J. Rudwick, Scenes from Deep Time (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992). 21. On the inhuman quality of scientific time scales see Jean-Francois Lyotard The Inhuman, trans. G. Bennington and R. Bowlby (Palo Alto: Stanford University Press, 1992). 22. Bruno Latour, We Have Never Been Modern, trans. Catherine Porter (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1997). 23. On the concept of deep nature and its predication on human absence see Peter van Wyck, Primitives in the Wilderness: Deep Ecology and the Absent Human Subject (Albany: SUNY Press, 1994). 24. It should be noted that the materiality of the photograph will provide some historicity. For example, the use of sepia tone provides a dated quality to the image regardless of what it represents. 25. Charles Millard, “Images of Nature: A Photo Essay,” in U. C. Knoepflmacher and G. B. Tennyson (eds.), Nature and the Victorian Imagination (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1977), 14-31. 26. Millard, “Images of Nature,” 25. 27. Millard, “Images of Nature,” 25. 28. Live, that is, at the time of the photo, the heron being certainly dead now. On the relation between the temporality of the photograph and death see Roland Barthes Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography, R. Howard (trans.) (New York: Hill and Wang, 1981). 29. Edmund White, “Animals, Vegetables and Minerals: the Lure and Lore of Nature Photography,” in Photographing Nature (New York: Time-Life Books, 1971), 13. 30. The depiction of live animals continues to be a problem for wildlife artists. See my “Robert Bateman’s Natural Worlds,” Journal of Canadian Studies 33.2 (Summer 1998): 98-128. 31. See Nicholas Hammond, Twentieth Century Wildlife Art (London: Croom Helm Ltd., 1986), 18 and Christopher Hume, From the Wild (Toronto: Summerhill Press, 1986), 15. 32. Hammond, Twentieth Century Wildlife, 14. Audubon was simply the most programmatic example of this phenomenon. He killed his subjects, wired them to grids for accurate depiction, and then would often eat them when done Hammond, Twentieth Century Wildlife, 19. See also Hume, From the Wild, 15. 33. It is only post ecology that the live animal comes to be a marker for the health (reality) of nature. We might position Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring as the origin of a North American mass consciousness of the animal as the marker of ecological health. Rachel Carson, Silent Spring (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2002). 34. U. C. Knoepflmacher and G. B. Tennyson, “Introduction,” in U. C. Knoepflmacher and G. B. Tennyson (eds.), Nature and the Victorian Imagination (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1977), xvii-xxiii, xxi. 35. On the conceptual role played by pre-human nature in contemporary ecological thought see van Wyck, Primitives in the Wilderness. 36. Knoepflmacher and Tennyson, “Introduction,” xxi. 37. Knoepflmacher and Tennyson, “Introduction,” xxi. 38. Millard, “Images of Nature,” 24. 39. Bill Readings discusses the manner in which Wordsworth’s inscription of meaning into the landscape underwrote its capitalistic exploitation through tourism. Bill Readings, The University in Ruins (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1996), 96. I discuss the implications of Readings’ argument for thinking animal imagery’s charging of the wild animal with symbolic meaning in Matthew Brower, “Robert Bateman’s Natural Worlds,” Journal of Canadian Studies 33.2 (Summer 1998): 66-77. 40. Millard, “Images of Nature,” 24. 41. On the use of animals as elements of the picturesque see also Basil Taylor, Animal Painting in England: From Barlow to Landseer (Hammondsworth, Middlesex: Penguin Books, 1955). 42. Millard, “Images of Nature,” 25. 43. The image is reproduced in Lanyon, “Frontispiece: Deer Parking,” 168. 44. The calotype is the photographic process invented by Fox Talbot in 1839. 45. Steve Baker, The Postmodern Animal (London: Reaktion Books, 2000), 62. 46. Harriet Ritvo, The Animal Estate (Cambridge: Harvard, University Press, 1987), 205-288. 47. Miles Orvell, The Real Thing: Imitation and Authenticity in American Culture, 1880-1940 (Chapel Hill: UNC Press, 1989), 77. 48. Orvell’s caution in many ways parallels John Tagg’s arguments on the historically constructed nature of photographic meaning. John Tagg, The Burden of Representation (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1988). 49. Among Llewelyn’s images is a photograph of a sporting print that may be by Landseer. http://www.swanseaheritage.net/article/gat.asp?ARTICLE_ID=1174 50. The aim of emphasizing the deer’s nobility could also be ascribed to the taxidermist. However, Llewelyn’s composition of the photograph with its emphasis on the deer’s head and antlers indicates his complicity in this construction. 51. The difference in function between Landseer's and Llewelyn’s deer could also be because Llewelyn’s deer is dead. However, what is decisive is the shift in the image’s function. The deer fails as an evocation of idealized nature. Treating this failure as productive I argue that the image presents a different conception of the animal and of nature. I would further argue that it is due to the change in the conception of the animal brought on by photography that Landseer’s deer now seem overly sentimental and anthropomorphized. 52. Berger, “Why Look at Animals?” 53. James R. Ryan “‘Hunting with the Camera:’ Photography, Wildlife and Colonialism in Africa,” in Chris Wilbert and Chris Philo (eds.), Animal Spaces, Beastly Places (London: Routledge, 2000), 203-221, 214. 54. Ryan, “Hunting with a Camera,” 206. 55. Kitty Hauser, “Coming Apart at the Seams: Taxidermy and Contemporary Photography,” Make: The Magazine of Women’s Art 82 (Dec. 98-Jan. 99): 8-11. 56. Hauser, “Coming apart at the Seams,” 9. 57. Ryan, “Hunting with a Camera,” 206-7. 58. In locating the relationship between photography and taxidermy as being between animal photography and taxidermy, Ryan backs off from Hauser’s larger claims. Hauser’s arguments operate on the level of photography and taxidermy’s structure of representation -- that both are “non-consensual” appropriations of surfaces from the world intimately related to death. “Coming apart at the Seams”. 59. John MacKenzie, The Empire of Nature: Hunting, Conservation and British Imperialism (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1988). 60. On the depiction of landscape as an Imperial form see W. J. T. Mitchell, “Landscape and Imperial Power,” in W. J. T. Mitchell (ed.), Landscape and Power (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992), 5-34. 61. Ryan, “Hunting with a Camera,” 214. 62. Millard suggests that picturesque photography was localized in England and ended by the mid 1880s as the development of photographic technology brought made the practice of photography widespread. 63. I analyze the relation between photography and hunting trophies in Matthew Brower, “Trophy Shots: Early American Non-Human animal Photography and the Display of Masculine Prowess,” Society and Animals 13.1, (2005): 13-32. |
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