![]() It’s as if their physical surroundings would portray them as too colorful, secure, settled in place. However, as headshots in blank backgrounds, removed from natural settings, they appear less than alluring and may even hint of stress. The 2014 World Wildlife Fund calendar features individual photo-portraits of iconic animals-a tiger, rhino, ape, and polar bear. There are other, creative approaches to involve us. I would argue we likely become even more static in our contemplative, aesthetic responses to them. Millet’s excoriating remarks force us to re-think what we are looking at in those glowing shots of nature, but even the most “seductive” scenery does not excite lascivious emotion nor the potential sexual release of pornography. They offer gratification without social cost they satiate by providing objects for fantasy without making uncomfortable demands on the subject. They offer comfort to the viewer: They will always be there, ideal, unblemished, available. They are placebos substituting for triage…. Tarted up into perfectly circumscribed simulations of the wild, these props of mainstream environmentalism serve as surrogates for real engagement with wilderness, the way porn models serve as surrogates for real women. She blasts the lush photos in the promotional calendars of most nature organizations as “eco-porn”: This is picture-book nature. The acclaimed novelist Lydia Millet has a starkly different reaction. So we buy the dazzling calendar and join the organization. ![]() Nature photography today, with the added benefits of Adobe’s Photoshop, seems to revel in a hyper “grandeurism.” An essential of most nature photography as a genre is to move us to love and revere it it further assumes that only through such a response will we feel the urge to preserve or restore it.Ĭontrariwise, pictures of environmental degradation may incite us, but they may just as likely turn off donors and drive activists away. Today, the digital revolution in photography results in natural scenery that never looked so alive, so vibrant and luminous, even transcendent, though many famous subjects we know are ecologically compromised, environmentally degraded, or simply destroyed. Sadly, even these new kinds of images could not stop the 1966 construction of the Glen Canyon Dam on the Colorado River, which put those spectacular locations permanently underwater. By mastering Kodak’s new dye-transfer color process, Porter was able to craft tonally subtle images with the clarity and detail of black and white-the only respected medium of nature photography up to that point, made famous by his mentor, Ansel Adams. His Glen Canyon series, The Place No One Knew (1963), composed for the Sierra Club, featured haunting, quasi-abstract images of rock formations and watercourses that evoked the canyon’s unappreciated, almost otherworldly majesty. Even if you do not recognize his name, you surely know his work. For this very reason, contemplating nature within the frame of photography also invites us to consider what sort of environmental understanding of our changing world nature photography does provide.Ĭonservation-minded photographers, such as the renowned Eliot Porter, often put photography to the political task of helping save the subjects they photograph. Watkins, Ansel Adams, Eliot Porter, and Robert Glenn Ketchum play a key part in modern cultural literacy about the environment and our evolving relationship to it. Dramatic images of nature help shape our consciousness about the physical world, and classic landscape photos by C.
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