四级阅读练习：摄影与自然环境_大学英语阅读

四级阅读练习：摄影与自然环境

　　Nature photography has become a potent tool in this struggle. Through it, we learn of the many others the wondrous diversity of flora and fauna with whom we cohabit on this planet. It is also, as the Guardians nature photography project reveals, a medium taken up by professionals and amateurs alike. So, what role does photography play in defining our relationship with nature? What do images of nature and wildlife tell us and why do we feel compelled to view them? Who among us has never been moved to snap a sunset on the horizon, a flowing river, a blossom in spring?

　　Our zeal for visually representing nature has a long and complex history. The advent of photography was celebrated as a milestone in the modernist quest to capture nature better. For early photography was largely devoted to documentary purposes and, in the apparent fidelity of its representations, the camera in the 19th century exceeded the naturalist drives of painters who, during the Renaissance and early modern period, tried to explore, and so tame, nature by rendering it into art.

　　Photography, however, is poised on a fine borderline between documentary and art. Never just one or the other, photographs can exceed the set frame. Moreover, the photographic frame can reveal the unsettling ability to extend and include us in its space. Photography is inclusive in its mediatory role. It extends covenants.

　　Often, nature photography calls on modern humanitys sense of nostalgia for a harmony between man and the environment. As John Berger has rightly stated, the way we see is conditioned by our history, and so it is that we may look at nature in terms of loss. As with the many images of the recent oil spill off the coast of Florida, this can be founded in fact and so provoke a sense of culpability, a sudden awareness or questioning of our precepts and actions. Photographs lead us to rethink, to realign the frame of our understanding.