Ethos: The Practical Ethics Blog

Untamed, the new coffee table book by Steve Bloom, is a photographic menagerie of five continents-worth of animals. Bloom spent ten years traveling throughout the world to amass a collection of photos that are as beautiful as they are insightful.

Often animal imagery suffers from being unilateral in its meaning — that is, the animal is conceptually flattened to depict a less-than-dynamic being. But the wonderful thing about Bloom’s work is how he seamlessly traverses a range of ideas in his vast portfolio. Each photo tells a story about an animal and it also reveals the complicated and diverse ways that Bloom sees animals.

In some pictures, the animals fill the frame with such abundance that they seem to become the landscape itself. They are not complacent residents of a habitat; instead, they ARE the habitat:

In other photos, Bloom reveals the interlocking relationship between animals and landscape, and the elemental essence of a single species. In these photos the animals are integrated but unique from their habitat. They are OF the landscape:

In still other photos, Bloom manages to create portraiture that captures the unique individuality of his subjects. He shoots with a sensitivity and tenderness that is common in pet portraiture, but extraordinarily rare in wildlife photography:

Bloom is at his best when he marries these three perspectives. In those unique moments he is able to communicate the vastness of landscape, the elemental essence of species and the uniqueness of individuality — all in a single photo. I imagine that achieving the integration of these concepts in a single photo is something a photographer waits a lifetime for:

As Bloom himself explains, “There remains the ongoing challenge to portray life in all its manifestations, and create images that reveal the very essence of what it is to be a living being.” Check out Bloom’s amazing work at his website, www.stevebloom.com.

Lisa Brown :: Feb.20.2008 :: Art :: No Comments »

A couple of months ago I had the pleasure of sitting in on an editing session for the upcoming film, Crash: A Tale of Two Species. Filmmaker Allison Argo weaves an incredible story about shorebirds and horseshoe crabs that is utterly compelling. As she and I discussed, she initially thought one of the challenges of the film would be in the difficulty of generating a relationship between the human audience and the horseshoe crabs. The crabs are as distinct from humans as a species can get. With their hard shell and hidden face, there is very little for viewers to visually relate to. But, as I can attest, she accomplishes this feat with subtlety and grace. By the end of the film I felt a connection with the crabs that I really hadn’t thought possible. It is in instances like these that I am reminded how wonderful the tool of anthropomorphism can be; how it can enable a human to genuinely step inside the shoes of such a unique creature.

Please set your DVR and watch this incredible testament to the integrated, interspecies, intertwined relationships between red knot shore birds, horseshoe crabs, and humans.

Sunday at 8pm on PBS. Check your local listings (or click here) for more information.

Lisa Brown :: Feb.07.2008 :: Art, Environmental Studies :: No Comments »

I have updated the Practical Ethics Gallery with fresh images from the work of Rob Hite. Here is an extract from the gallery text. Please stop in and see his wonderful work by clicking here.

cheers, Bill

~~~

Rob’s early work routinely depicts people and animals through painting. The people are physically invisible in our field of view but are nonetheless manifest through their constructions. And the constructions are almost always juxtaposed and integrated into a landscape of animals and wildish nature. In my previous introduction to Rob’s gallery, I described this as a theme of ‘dwelling in mixed communities’. For Rob, dwelling is about people and animals living in natural and cultural landscapes. His art prefigures a vibrant vision of a mixed community of beings who are human and non-human, wild and domestic.

I think much of his latter work manifests this same vision, if in a different way. Take for example the sculpture and photography project, ‘Imagined Histories’. Here Rob creates sculptures of dwellings with a mythical sensibility, installs them in the landscape of the Hudson River Valley, and photographs the result. Displays of both the sculptures and photos are then shown in galleries around the Northeast. It is a beautiful body of art, some of which is shown here.

These sculptures and photographs are not adequately interpreted in terms of landscape art or sustainability alone. Rather Rob visually resituates human endeavours as part of a more than human world. He depicts humans as the animals we are, embedded in all we do in the natural world, dwelling amongst and with other creatures. He implies this through the scale of the sculptures, and the wildish looking locales in which they are photographed. His whimsical, mythological forms allow us to step back from current architecture and landscape development. To remember bedtime stories and ethnographic traditions of animal-friendly cultures, real or imagined. To envision other possibilities for living on earth.

Rob scales us down to size, visually, aesthetically and morally. He envisions a more humble humanity. And in so doing, he reveals an aesthetic and ethical landscape where we might live in a truly mixed community of people, animals and nature.

Image: Robert Hite. Bird Trap. 2006. Wood construction.

William Lynn :: Feb.03.2008 :: Art, Environmental Studies, Ethics, Human-Animal Studies :: No Comments »