Familiar British Wildlife

This quirky book was recommended by my Tutor in response to my images of dead birds at Rye Harbour. The pictures are all of road kill, catalogued with their latin names and the road letter/number on which they perished.

There is therefore a sense of the surreal and perhaps the humorous, in the very British sense. However, as indicated in the book’s essay by John Taylor, much more serious messages can be taken from the work.

For a start, how the British love of wildlife clashes dramatically with the need for urban expansion and the desire to get everywhere faster – the power humans weald in the anthropocene epoch bestows on us the responsibility to decide on the fate of other creatures. Images have the ability to act in memoriam. Their repeated presentation, a form of argument by weight of evidence, might be designed to appeal to the conscience of the viewer. While we have destructive potential, we also have the capability of working in balance with nature (if not yet the desire).

Presented on the galleries walls, printed large, and lit in some cases with a warm light reminiscent of the more traditional nature morte, the viewer can contemplate the beauty and also the destruction of this beauty, often in grizzly detail artfully arranged in the frame. And perhaps then contemplate their contemplation – what it means to stare at these pictures, or even to be able to stare at them.

What also interests me is the timescale of things – each individual crime against nature may be almost meaningless in the “grand scheme of things”, but nature as a whole plays a far longer game than mankind is capable of contemplating. These photographs could also, therefore, be evidence of our own decline.

So it ironic how what begins so simply can, in a few short sentences, become relevant to life, the universe and everything. And perhaps relevant too for linking the visual and written aspects of the course …

BIBLIOGRAPHY

1. Landen. C (1993) Familiar British Wildlife. Cardiff/Cambridge: Ffotogallery/Cambridge Darkroom Gallery