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.
The force of photography also lies in its playfulness. And by this, I mean the many overlapping discoveries of unvoiced knowledge, feelings and imagination that we stumble upon via images. So, the flipside of loss or pathos can be a freshness of vision or a change of perspective. Above all, nature photography lends to our lives what we long ago lost in our modern abandonment of nature the experience of wonderment, that sense of discovery, newness and awe.
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