Forgetting Nature: A Visual Manipulation of Sebastião Salgado’s Genesis
Daniel Phillips Text & Image 5 April 2007
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“Ours is the ability, the need , to gainsay or ‘unsay’ the world, to image it and speak it otherwise” -George Steiner
Brazilian photographer Sebastião Salgado has invested much of his life in long term photo-essay projects that span a gamut of fiercely political subjects ranging from forced human migration and the desperation of landless peasants, to police brutality. His recent, (and as rumor has it, his last) photographic endeavor is entitled Genesis—an ambitious account of that which remains of the untouched natural environment, that has brought him through the tundra of Antarctica, the dense tropical forests of Brazil, the lonely expanses of African wilderness, and the volcanic shores of the Galapagos islands. Salgado explains the photos as part of a larger agenda for promoting increased awareness of environmental decline. As he states, "In the end, the only heritage we have is our planet, and I have decided to go to the most pristine places on the planet and photograph them in the most honest way I know…I want to see if I can put a kind of virginity in these pictures” (Hattenstone). The question “what is nature” is of central importance to any discussion of Genesis as an instrument of reforming environmental consciousness. In recognizing that cultural realities are composed largely of linguistic and imagistic structures, perhaps this question is best answered by exposing the very mechanics of Natures’ visual construction. With regard to our innate conceptions of that which is “natural”, it is certainly into the liminal space between the signifier and the signified that we must now insert ourselves if a new mode of understanding is to be realized. There was perhaps a time in our development when this question (what is naure?) warranted a simple answer, a time when Nature (with a capital “N”) was a fundamental
Phillips 2 reality, a tangible presence (and as integral to the daily lives of humans as is water in the daily life of a fish). Yet within the context of our contemporary reality (at least for those who enjoy the entitlements of the first world), after over a century of development and rampant urbanization, nature it seems is best understood as operating within quotation marks, growing increasingly distant from a former state of simply being. To better grasp the stakes of such a topic, we might pause to consider the notion of “Nature” in two very different respects, as outlined elsewhere by contemporary landscape theorist James Corner. There is of course a crucial distinction:
“The first, “nature”, refers to the concept of nature, the cultural construction that enables a people to speak of and understand the natural world, and that is to bound to ecological language; the second, “Nature”, refers to the amorphous and unmediated flux that is the “actual” cosmos, that which always escapes or exceeds human understanding” (Corner 98).
It could be argued that Salgado’s Genesis project best exemplifies the latter sense of the term “Nature”. His depictions of places left seemingly untouched by the influence of globalized culture, and the ideologies and tenants of the first world, implies that “authentic” forms of Nature still exist, that some residue of what we might call “the wild” continues in distant reaches of the globe in an unmediated flux. To capture a moment of such a flux, might further imply an instant of alignment with the timeless—the world as it existed long before it became imagable to man. Could we then justifiably claim that Salgado’s is an attempt to capture an essence? To denote Nature with a capital N?
Phillips 3 Of course it is vital at this point to acknowledge the problematic of the photoessay more generally, and the range of semiotic issues the genre of “documentary” photography so obviously implies. The peculiar claim to the camera’s mechanical detachment is in fact steeped in what could be called a fallacy of objectivity, or as Wendy Kozol describes, the “prestige of denotation” associated with photographic realism (Kozol 50). This is to suggest that the subjectivity, and thus the latent ideological agendas of the photographer cannot be divorced from the photograph’s seemingly faithful depiction of reality. “Far from being merely a “window on the world”, photography encodes social norms and privileges certain perspectives on a historical moment” (52). However, if this issue can be momentarily suspended, one could assume then, that the photographic images of Salgado’s Genesis series do in fact depict an “authentic” version of nature, a specific instance of a previously unknowable natural scene (albeit subjectively composed) without immediate regard to its idealization. The former, culturally constructed sense of the word “nature” in the context of visual culture is perhaps best exemplified in the form of the 18th century landscape painting. Employing the strict compositional strategy of linear perspective, this genre of painting both reflects and reinforces the anthropocentric position of man as a master of the natural world. This stylistic conceit is based on the subjugation of the natural world to a tidy, pictorial equivalent. As geographer Denis Cosgrove observes:
“A reference dated 1725 the OED defines landscape as “A view or prospect of natural inland scenery, such as can be taken in at a glance from one point of view. A further definition, supported by a reference from 1603 confirms the origin of this meaning: ‘a picture representing natural inland scenery as
Phillips 4 distinct from a sea picture, a portrait etc. In this sense landscape is the area subtended to the eye and vision of an observer who will, at least in theory, paint it. (Cosgrove 20).
The idealized perspectival scenes of romanticized wilderness settings, complete with images of placid lakes, grazing cattle, and softly dappled cloud formations as apparent in the work of 18th century figures such as Joseph Wright of Derby represent (as Cosgrove further elucidates), a “technique of composition which served to underwrite the image of a world unchanging and stable in the relationships between humans and nature” (38). In contrast to the unmediated flux of the “actual cosmos”, the landscape painting portrays a picturesque equivalent, a neatly generalized simulacra in high resolution, an image of “nature” rendered inert (see appendix B). As ecologist John Dixon Hunt observes, “The main concern of the picturesque was how to process the unmediated wild world, how to control it or make it palatable for consumption by sanitizing it with art” (Hunt 288). This condition (observed presently in the typology of the typical urban park) portends the abstraction of nature away from its former material reality and potency— nature recast as farce, relegated to the distant edge of our collective evolutionary memory. It is precisely this condition of the recognizable, the symbolic, or as Barthes might describe as the condition of “connotation parading as denotation”, that prevents the formation of alternative conceptions of nature from coming into being. Of course to confront this fact is to confront the cognitive functioning of the human mind itself and its tendency abstain from the variable accidentals and particulars of perception in favor of familiar typological essences (the Cat, the Tree, etc). As light and space artist Robert
Phillips 5 Irwin aptly observes, it is “this abstraction determines how the world of mental constructs can legitimately be obtained from the world of phenomena” (Irwin 22). What might engender a realignment of these mental constructs is a focusing on the unfathomable aspects of nature that resist signification; in effect--a means of “unsaying” the world (as Irwin further states, “to see is to forget the name of that which is seen”). Most important in such an act of forgetfulness is the prospect of re-definition. After all, if nature is inevitably entrenched in the cultural, “one must get behind the veneer of language in order to discover aspects of the unknown within what is already familiar” (Corner 71). Thus, the visual manipulation of Salgado’s Genesis posits a coming to terms with “Nature” as both a cultural and an actual process. The chapter of Salgado’s Genesis project that will serve as the feedstock for a visual manipulation is a relatively recent series of photographs featuring the geography and wildlife in and around the Bwindi Impenetrable Forest in Uganda (see appendix A). The accompanying textual information, comprised primarily of superficial anecdotes and available only in the online version of the essay, was intentionally omitted in the service of focusing on the visual. Firstly, this original content was traced, de-saturated of all tonal values, and offset to a level of total abstraction. Salgado’s claims of universal truth are thus presented as a semblance of the unidentifiable, artificial. Now freed of all symbolic content, the photos (once recognizable representations of gorillas and scenes of the forest) are reduced to a visually jumbled web of messy particulars (or, as it were, the unfathomable complexity of that which constitutes the actual Natural world). These exploded contours are no longer bound to the limits of the photographic image and amble freely about the page in a state
Phillips 6 of visual collusion and overlap. A condition of motion is further implied, a reference to the fungible processes of the natural environment (see appendix B). Behind this sprawling abstraction is a linearly arranged series of 18th century landscape paintings that are only recognizable through the omitted portions of the forgrounded visual field. As already discussed these, compositions represent the cultural vehicle for an idealized, picturesque construction of the “natural” world, the high resolution renditions of a timeless constant, the performative conceptual double of the Real. Thus the resulting composition represents a radical juxtaposition of these polarized notions of “Nature”, presented as a moment in which the real fake and the fake real collide. In placing the abstracted photos in front of the perspectival landscape paintings, there is of course a visual dominance of the specific over the universal, or in terms more appropriately semiotic, the signified effectively takes presence over that which is signifier. In a contemporary global context marked by the emerging concerns as to the sustainability of the planet’s ecological systems, the implications of that which is perceived to be “Nature” transcend the dictates of the merely semiotic. After all, it is imperative to recognize that these constructs not only enable a linguistic signification of the external world (otherwise relegated to undecipherable phenomena), but structure equally our subjective ontological relation to this world. As Corner further illustrates: We do not so much live in forests of trees as much as in forests of words. And the source of the blight that afflicts the earth’s forests must be sought in the word forests—that is, in the world we articulate, and which confirms us as agents of that earthly malaise”, (Corner 100).
Phillips 7 The larger question of whether “man” and “earth” can foster a relationship that is mutually supportive presents itself as perhaps the most pressing existential question of today. The root cause, it would seem, of our current inability to deal with the tangible environmental crisis, is the sustained anthropocentrism of our cultural constructs--the fact that we remain caught between recognizing ourselves as part of Nature and separate from it. Yet to the extent that “Nature” is fundamentally a way of seeing, laying bare the very mechanics of how these notions of constructed is arguably the first step in placing human consciousness in a position of renewed agency amid a process of change and regeneration. If we are to come to terms with “Nature” in the present, and take efforts to deal with the implications of its increasing abstraction, we must first understand and finally alter how this idea operates within the context of both the symbolic and the actual. The hope, then, in this visual overlay of factual and the fictional is the perceptual “erasure” of culturally engrained conceptions of nature, the nurturing within this empty symbolic space a renewed sense of wonderment, and perhaps by extension, the formation of new modes of understanding and engaging with the material world. Indeed, the fostering of a more authentic construction of “the natural” is not predicated on a passive condition of knowing, but rather an active and perpetual state of forgetting.
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Appendix A— Photos from Sabastaio Salgado’s Genesis project (taken in the remote forests of Uganda)
Phillips 9 Appendix B— Nature and “nature”
(Process of freeing the signified of the signifier)
(18th century landscape paintings)
Phillips 10 References Hunt, John Dixon. “The Picturesque Legacy to Modernist Landscape Architecture” (ARLI History & Theory IV).. 288-320 Cosgrove, Denis. “The Idea of Landscape”. (ARLI History & Theory IV). 13-38 Corner, James. “Ecology and Landscape as Agents of Creativity”, (ARLI History & Theory IV). 81-100 Irwin, Robert. Robert Irwin. New York, New York: Whitney Museum of Art, 1977. Kozol, Wendy. “Looking at Life”. Life’s America. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1994. Solomon-Godeau, Abagail. “Who Is Speaking Thus? Some Questions about Documentary Photography”. Photography at the Dock. University of Minnesota Press, 1995. Hattenstone, Simon. “In the Beginning”. The Guardian Online. September 2004 http://photography.about.com/gi/dynamic/offsite.htm?site=http://talk.workunlimited.co.uk/arts/salgado/ima ge/0%2C15021%2C1299951%2C00.html (accessed 25 March 2007).