Some Thoughts on the Role of Photography in the Anthropocene

"What does it mean to be a photographer today and is it still relevant to make a picture when an infinite number already exist?"
-- Ignacio Guevara

I would say that we live in unprecedented times – with the biology of the planet, including humans, under existential threat. The old stories we have told ourselves, based on the myths of eternal "progress" and the idea that humans are somehow "separate" from the planet on which they exist, have proven to be destructive fictions. Accordingly, photography that seeks to tell new (or old and resurrected) founding cultural stories is photography that is highly relevant, crucial, essential.

My other thought is that -- whether or not we realize it, -- we exist in a battlefield of images warring for influence upon our consciousness. On one side, there are the ubiquitous images generated by the corporate advertising machine. These images seek to transform humans into consumers with empty materialist values and yearnings that can only be satiated – temporarily and incompletely – through the purchase of products. On the other side, there are people creating images and capturing images which seek to challenge and deepen human consciousness. These are images which seek to draw the human moth away from the flame of empty consumption. And so, again, photography is deeply relevant today.

The Shell Ring of Hilton Head Island and the Destiny of Humans

I had Derek Jensen’s 2011 book Dreams -- a work which explores the relationship between human consciousness and our treatment of the planet -- with me on a trip to an island off of South Carolina last summer. My partner had a work conference on Hilton Head, and so I did a little background reading on the history of the region and learned that the island has been inhabited by humans for approximately 12,000 years. I read of a “shell ring” at least 10,500 years old created by the island’s original human inhabitants (of whom little is known presently) and that remains in a nature preserve on the island.

The beach in front of the hotel where Christine’s work put us up was beautiful, but in a wide and empty and somehow eerie way. The landscapes internal, external and eternal that Jensen explores in Dreams were very much part of my experience of it and of the whole island. I saw the several million-year-old design traces in the saxophone-shaped bills of the large seabirds gliding the air currents outside our third-floor window and over the beach. I felt the warm water tides arriving and receding as part of something deep in me – but a me is older than anything of which I had previously conceived -- and as part of a self that is not only me, but exists in relationship with all of creation.

Becoming evermore aware of the heightening Earth crisis in which we find ourselves, one question pounded incessantly through my head during the trip: How did the original people of the island live for 12,000 years here without fucking it up? Practicing a version of the sacred insight Jensen writes about frequently – learn to see the world as subjects to be listened to and not objects to be exploited - I asked the flora and fauna and waves and sands and rocks of the island this question. But I also asked the question to the spirits of the original humans of the island. And I knew I must pose this question at the site of the accumulated pieces of shell and pottery placed in a ring on the island over the centuries for reasons we no longer know, but for reasons that were vitally important to the people and suggest a gesture of the sacred.

The day we went to the nature preserve, a tropical storm was predicted. It never arrived, but there were dark clouds rolling above, mixed in with the sunshine. We made it to a large, open pond where two seabirds - one long-legged and one round and plump – stood motionless in the soft rain that had begun to fall. From the little gazebo where we sought shelter to the shell ring was not far. Walking to it, the forest surrounded me with a presence that felt at once unsettling and old/known/familial.

Being a sound-oriented person, I experienced our approach to the sacred site as a rising dull tone in my body. And all the while, the question surged within me: How did you live here so long without destroying this place? I saw the ring out of the corner of my right eye and at this moment I heard a loud clattering. I looked up to see an enormous branch falling down directly toward Christine. I yelled for her to move and physically jerked her back to avoid the branch that really could have hurt her, falling from such a height. My question had been answered.

The answer was clearer and resonated on levels that a message formed in words cannot: You must stop this terrible destruction or so much more will be lost. This, the violent gesture of the forest and of the spirits of the original inhabitants told me. I experienced the message in the very ancient part of my brain that goes back to the dawn of the evolution of creatures – in the “fight or flight” spot of the brain. I will be living the consequences of that message for the rest of my life.