Following the Deer
The camera is camouflaged and strapped to the tree. Sometimes a red light blinks. The Whitetail buck doesn’t care, the doe is mindful and the coyote suspects a trap. No one else is there for now. Bresson’s Zen archer is napping in the pine grove, dreaming of half-naked fishermen throwing their nets up into the clouds and the photographer is with the children telling them a story about a hunter who tracks a deer deep in the forest to a glade that he knows but never expected to see. Around the edges of the clearing the hunter glimpses people that he thinks he should know: a girl recovering from death, a man healing a small bird in his mouth, another man overcoming his fear of snakes with the help of a doe. Someone is making a fire. There are choirboys and raccoons. Nobody stays for long. A runaway child slips into the glade and joins the animals. She wants to have the coyote for her own. She’ll stay with the runaway but won’t get to close.
Some of the stories the photographer tells are true. Some are outright lies. He explains to the children that photographs don’t lie but he doesn’t need to; the children can tell when a lie is true and, in any case, are somewhat flexible on the issue.
Called trail-cams, the cameras I use for most of these photographs are marketed to hunters, scientists and cryptozoologists to keep track of their quarry. Sturdy instruments that can be left outdoors for years, they are triggered by motion, shoot infrared at night and can take videos. I aim them, strap them to a tree and change the memory cards every so often. It’s always exciting to see what I’ve caught.
Much of my landscape work suggests my physical presence and a reasonably skillful management of good equipment. I found my lack of participation in these automatic and lo-fi photos disconcerting at first but I have discovered that my absence is an essential element of the work.
The camera is fixed and the site becomes a stage. The story is that the photographed events occur while no one is looking. The animals enter and leave with a natural grace, alert to their environment but interacting only with each other. The photos are shot up close without telephoto contributing to the candid feel of the scenes. In my studio, I feel like a puppeteer moving the players around on this stage. When the animals and the human characters occasionally acknowledge the camera, they break the fourth wall of their stage and establish a direct relationship to their surveillance and their audience.
As a composer of music, this fixed site or stage appeals to a core music architectural value of repetition and variation. To emphasize this, I assemble the photographs in thematic or narrative groups that I associate with symphonic movements, players in an ensemble and thematic suites.
The textural grain, gained from conversion of digital images to film, is made visible in the large-scale prints and lifted into the light by the textured canvas, allows the images to dissipate at close range like the dreams, myths and wild animals they represent. In the multi-paneled pieces, the grain dissolves and resolves from one image to the next like fragments of memory.
Some of the stories the photographer tells are true. Some are outright lies. He explains to the children that photographs don’t lie but he doesn’t need to; the children can tell when a lie is true and, in any case, are somewhat flexible on the issue.
Called trail-cams, the cameras I use for most of these photographs are marketed to hunters, scientists and cryptozoologists to keep track of their quarry. Sturdy instruments that can be left outdoors for years, they are triggered by motion, shoot infrared at night and can take videos. I aim them, strap them to a tree and change the memory cards every so often. It’s always exciting to see what I’ve caught.
Much of my landscape work suggests my physical presence and a reasonably skillful management of good equipment. I found my lack of participation in these automatic and lo-fi photos disconcerting at first but I have discovered that my absence is an essential element of the work.
The camera is fixed and the site becomes a stage. The story is that the photographed events occur while no one is looking. The animals enter and leave with a natural grace, alert to their environment but interacting only with each other. The photos are shot up close without telephoto contributing to the candid feel of the scenes. In my studio, I feel like a puppeteer moving the players around on this stage. When the animals and the human characters occasionally acknowledge the camera, they break the fourth wall of their stage and establish a direct relationship to their surveillance and their audience.
As a composer of music, this fixed site or stage appeals to a core music architectural value of repetition and variation. To emphasize this, I assemble the photographs in thematic or narrative groups that I associate with symphonic movements, players in an ensemble and thematic suites.
The textural grain, gained from conversion of digital images to film, is made visible in the large-scale prints and lifted into the light by the textured canvas, allows the images to dissipate at close range like the dreams, myths and wild animals they represent. In the multi-paneled pieces, the grain dissolves and resolves from one image to the next like fragments of memory.
