(An earlier version of this essay first appeared in the October 2000 issue of Jefferson Monthly, the magazine of Jefferson Public Radio in southern Oregon and Northern California. This essay is copyright © Pepper Trail.) Image and Absolute by Pepper Trail November 25, 2004 My house has been the site of a lively intergenerational debate this summer, about nothing less than the nature of reality. The immediate topic of debate is: what is a photograph? In media-saturated America, photographs are the currency with which we trade in reality. But what do they tell us, and how do we weigh their value? These questions have opened a revelatory dialog between myself and my son. There is no doubt that my own relationship with photography was bequeathed to me by my father. Professionally, he was a photographer for the New York State Agricultural Experiment Station. From 9 to 5, he labored for the taxpayers, doing his best to make shiny farm equipment impressive, new apple varieties appetizing, and shyly smiling agronomists interesting. But after hours, he used the camera in the service of his artist's eye and naturalist's heart, and photographed the flowers, insects, and birds whose lives he knew so well. One of my favorite spots as a boy was a tall stool in my father's darkroom, where I perched amid the sharp and commanding smells of mysterious chemicals, and watched as images swam up out of pools of dim red light. It was a moment of truth. Was the hoped-for picture there, or was it not? This spring, I visited Zion National Park, and found myself paying homage to its beauty with roll after roll of film. The Navajo sandstone cliffs were so red that they bled their colors into the waters of the Virgin River, which ran in Easter-egg pastels of pink and purple. The cottonwoods along the banks were a soft and tremulous green in the depths of the shadowed canyon, but flared into breathtaking incandescence when speared by shafts of sunlight. On the high slickrock plateau, mounded stone hoodoos and wind-twisted junipers twined in a fluid but frozen dance. I spent hours seeking that perfect image of azure sky, carnelian stone, and viridian leaf that would capture the essence of the place. For me, a nature photograph is, or should be, the record of a particular and irreproducible moment. My instincts -- by which I suppose I mean my accumulated tastes, preconceptions, and crotchets -- refuse to have it any other way. I hunt for a photograph in much the same way that, as a naturalist, I search for an animal. That is, I try to put myself in the place where the image, an extremely wary, fleet, and fleeting creature, may allow itself to be seen. I prepare as much of my vision as I can, selecting subject, angle, and composition, but then must wait for visitation by that most ineffable and unpredictable element: the light. As I carefully composed shot after shot at Zion, I found myself musing about the nature of images, and the essence of the absolute. Was the picture in my viewfinder a finished portrait, or was it a sketch? Was it the end of the creative process, or the beginning? Was it reality, or was it raw material? This new perspective came courtesy of my 14-year old son Graham, who had his own photography project this spring. Armed with a digital camera and his computer, he produced a portfolio of amazing pictures, using a bewildering arsenal of image-processing techniques. His view of photography could not be more different from mine. The questions that I find so intractable are not even an issue for him. For Graham, a photograph is something to digitize and to start to play with. And so, like many a parent of teenagers, I find myself looking at the world through new eyes. Our family debate echoes a larger controversy that is now raging in the field of nature photography. This is exemplified by the book, Virtual Wilderness: the Nature Photographers Guide to Computer Imaging, by Tim Fitzharris, which extols the creative potential of digital techniques for manipulating scanned photographs. It includes some incredible images, of such things as elephants (photographed in Africa) climbing glistening white sand dunes (photographed in New Mexico), and of wolves (photographed in an enclosure) placed against a wilderness background (from Alaska), with their howling muzzles dramatically emitting cold clouds of mist (digitally fabricated). There is a growing movement that asserts that such manipulation, when unacknowledged, amounts to falsification, and undermines the veracity of nature photography as a documentary medium. A grassroots program called "FoundView" has sprung up to support photographers who certify that no elements of an image have been altered (except tonally) since the shutter was clicked. This is so-called "single-click photography," which is growing in acceptance as a standard for reality-based imaging. Now, I don't consider myself a purist by any means. I accept that photography, by its very nature, is a highly artificial and selective act. Like virtually all photographers, I use filters and manipulate depth of field to create images that my eyes could never see, and my son has shown me that brilliantly creative and evocative images can result from digital manipulation. What I find troubling is not the technology but the ideology. To my mind, a photographer -- like an ecologist and a land manager -- is a student of nature, not its master. Digital manipulation of images troubles me to the extent that it divorces us from the natural moment, that it fosters an illusion of control. "Virtual wilderness" is not merely a contradiction in terms; it is a dangerous delusion. I guess what I hope for from my son is simply the acknowledgment that there is such a thing as the irreplaceable moment. There is a sacredness in that instant when a breeze stirs a meadowful of camas flowers; when the scream of a hawk suddenly fills a silent canyon; and when the deer turns its head and looks straight into your eyes. The only way to have these moments is to be there. For most of us, days and weeks and months of our lives may pass without leaving a trace of lasting memory. But those moments of "being there," measured out in seconds, will remain with us to the end of our lives, worn smooth and familiar by recollection. Constantly surrounded as we are by devices that produce and reproduce images and sounds, we are in danger of losing the unmanipulated moment. What will that mean? It is hard to know -- such a situation is new in the history of life. But I fear that the glare of the image will come to blind us to the shape of the absolute. Paradoxically, drunk with images, we will be left at last without vision. At that moment, we will find that we are lost indeed. About the Author: Pepper Trail is a writer, photographer, and wildlife biologist living in Ashland, Oregon. His photographs have been published in National Geographic, and his essays have appeared in many publications in the Pacific Northwest. For a "low-tech" website with contact information and additional essays, visit www.concept-labs.com/pepper. See list of other DP&I.com essays and commentary here. ^ back to top Home | About Us | Advertise | Contact Us News & Reviews | How-To's | Resources © 2002-2007 Harald Johnson Communications. All rights reserved.