I think that a possible takeaway that an audience could have from my image set is thoughts concerning the intersection between nature and civilisation. The other day I read an essay by William Cronon called ‘The Trouble with Wilderness: Or, Getting Back to the Wrong Nature’ in which he proposes, to briefly summarise, that the term ‘wilderness’ is enmeshed in the binary of ‘the sublime’ and ‘the frontier’ (i.e., overwhelming spiritual spectacle, traditionally confronted by the romantic poets, contrasted with the mythologisation of the American frontier) which helps foster a relationship between humans and nature that perpetuates the idea of there being only two states of being: civilisation (‘over here’) and the natural world (‘out there’). His idea of “[abandoning] the dualism that sees the tree in the garden as artificial—completely fallen and unnatural—and the tree in the wilderness as natural—completely pristine and wild” is a possible solution to helping us “perceive and recognise nature we [have] forgotten to recognise as natural”. This idea resonated with me.
I have chosen to shoot in a 1:1 because I wanted to allude somewhat to the potential of a harmonious and even relationship that civilisation can create with the natural world that it tangles itself in. Civilisation and nature can interact with symmetry and union. I think, therefore, that there may be a theme of utopianism that is readable in the work. The images are shot in a plain but candid style which I think lends itself nicely to the authenticity of the message of the piece.
The narrative explores Cronons binary of nature/civilisation. This is represented by the two opposing spectrums in the ordering of the images. The first image in the series is one of ‘ideal’ nature and the last is of cerebral architecture. The blending of the two in the middle perhaps points to how nature and civilisation can meet in the middle to create harmony between humans and the natural world. It could also be read as demonstrating how the ‘wilderness’ is not solely an “exotic other that lives far away” but also an “other within” (as Cronon puts it).
Personally, this project is about my interest in the way that photography can capture fragments of free-falling pieces of reality as they pass by. I hope to expand on this broad theme in future works.
