CR # 4
Relating Learning To See by Barry Lopez and Why Look at Animals by John Berger to my Senior Project.
One of the first times I feel like I really articulated why I am so drawn to ecology and observation of nature was after watching elephant seals lounge on the beach in Big Sur. The reason I was so infatuated, I concluded, was because it feels like sometimes I can see a more clear reflection of myself and my human world in the non human lives around me.
This is something that Barry Lopez understands well, and explores in his essay Learning to See. In short, Learning to See is a meandering essay in which Lopez writes about his decision to choose writing over photography. For him, the camera becomes the only frame through which he is able to view the world. He begins the essay writing about his experience figuring out what to say at the opening remarks of an event remembering Robert Adams’ work. He uses this as a springboard. He reflects how he was never able to capture a story beyond the photo with his photography like Robert Adams could; he remembers an assignment where he went to photograph polar bears in the arctic. It was a hard expedition, but one day he and the crew had an extraordinary intimate moment with a bear. Yet Lopez felt at a loss. He felt unable to capture the entirety of that moment, and unable to experience the moment because he was trying to capture it. He goes on to say that for him, writing is the way where he thinks he is best able to tell the story and experience the world.
Reading this essay felt like I was finally receiving answers to questions I didn’t even know I had. It was unbelievably resonant. Lopez’s descriptions of using creativity to understand the world, — how he unpacks the complex relationship between humans and the natural world, how he considers himself a guest in the presence of fauna — were quite elucidating and informing of my own questions. When my plan was to do the appalachian trail, the sub questions I was going in with were: how do I show meaning greater than words through sketches and how do I show meaning greater than sketches with words? Lopez’s intentful approach to telling the stories of those around him will inform how I do so with my senior project. How can I tell a story through one painting? How can I tell a story through a series of paintings? How can I tell a story through multiple series of paintings? These are the questions that I am coming away from Learning to See with. In many ways, these are things I had already been grappling with. For example, my art teacher pointed out how painting birds flying is a dead give away that the painting is from a photo. With my paintings of birds on branches, it gives much more of a ‘this is a bird how I saw it’ impression — which is what I want. Looking at the world with the intent of telling its story, its truth, allows you to see more than you otherwise would. Painting with the intent of showing the bird how I saw it rather than simply what my camera saw, makes a more intimate relationship between the bird and myself, and thus a more intimate relationship. All in all, Learning to See is a fabulous and beautiful essay that pairs beautifully with John Berger’s Why Look at Animals, my first text.
Berger asserts that we are both like and unlike animals, and this is one of the most important facts to understanding them and their role in the modern world. This duality defines our relationship with animals; we both sacrifice and worship them, they hold places in our myths and religious explanations of the world. This I understand, I think it is what I was touching on at the windy beach in Big Sur. But the question remains, why? Berger brings up many points to answer this question, but firstly and most importantly, he says that any look at animals in the modern world can be nothing more than a commentary on our separation from them. No words better describe this than his opening lines of the essay “To suppose that animals first entered the human imagination as meat or leather or horn is to project a 19th century attitude backwards across the millennia. Animals first entered the imagination as messengers and promises. For example, the domestication of cattle did not begin as a simple prospect of milk and meat. Cattle had magical functions, sometimes oracular, sometimes sacrificial” (1). Our modern world, by construct, has removed animals from our lives, whereas they used to be at the center, standing right next to us, they now exist in cages and on screens. He later goes on to write “what distinguished man from animals was the human capacity for symbolic thought…Yet the first symbols were animals” (7). Now, however, the only thing that animals can symbolize is their lack of ability to symbolize anything else, according to Berger. This brings up enough questions to write many essays. Are my paintings all commentary on our alienation from nature? When I really think about it, I can’t argue otherwise. The painting of the human with wings, mournfully looking down with an eagle on their shoulder undoubtedly is speaking on this separation. My paintings of birds no doubt are inextricable from that alienation for my audience. My paintings of birds attacking churches are unarguably a commentary on this alienation. Even going on a two month backpacking trip for the purpose of recording nature is a reaction to that alienation. In so many ways, the story that I am telling through my paintings is of that distance between us and them, it is the reality that I grapple with as someone who finds so much joy and inspiration in the natural world.
To bring it back to Lopez, I think in many ways the dissonance that Lopez felt with the polar bear is a product of the modern world that Berger is describing. What Lopez is grappling with is trying to reach beyond the alienation — something I can relate to after reading Why Look at Animals. Though again, I think what I can really take away from Lopez’s piece is how to approach this work with intent. The fact that I am aware of more after reading these two pieces will change my work because now I have more standards to question myself by.
Berger’s essay is full of interesting commentary, ranging from the poignance of animals in human history and mythology, their pure importance to our survival, to lastly, that zoos are our final and unforgivable sin among the many we have committed against our none human brethren. For the sake of the length of this reflection, I won’t go on, except for one last instigating point.
“Look” in the context of ‘why look at animals’ implies something more than simply seeing with eyes; it means why do animals exist in our culture the way they do, why have we found meaning in looking at animals. Berger argues that we have destroyed this relationship, because we can’t conceptualize them looking back, because it is a one way relationship defined by our believed superiority. This is also something that Lopez comments on. Lopez says that there is almost a pornographic aspect to the photography of wildlife, a breach in privacy. In every way this is because of what Berger is describing. It is also something that I heavily relate to. There is something weird about me meandering through the park with my camera, waiting for little birds to land within camera shooting distance. Or to be more precise, it feels weird when I press the button on the camera. It feels natural to sit by the edge of the pond and marvel at the ducks; perhaps Berger would say that too is pornographic, though I’m not sure Lopez would.
Honestly, it is all very complicated, and sometimes seems contradictory but reading these two pieces in relationship to my senior project has been very enlightening.
Sources:
Lopez, Barry Holstun. About This Life: Journeys on the Threshold of Memory. The Harvill Press, 1999. (Learning to See is an essay in About This Life)
Berger, John. Why Look at Animals? Penguin Books, 2009.