The living world is not a backdrop
We photograph nature as scenery. We legislate it as resource. Both mistakes come from the same place: treating the living world as the stage rather than the system we belong to.
There is a habit, deep in how we see, that puts nature behind us. The mountains are the background of the photo. The forest is the setting of the story. The ocean is the resource on the balance sheet.
In each case the living world is positioned as the stage on which the real action — human action — takes place.
A reversal
But the living world is not the backdrop. It is the system we are inside of, the one that makes our action possible at all. The atmosphere is not scenery. The soil is not set dressing. The ocean is not a warehouse.
This sounds obvious written down. It is not obvious in how we behave.
A lot of my photography is an attempt to undo this habit in myself — to photograph nature not as something pretty behind a subject, but as the subject, the agent, the system. When I get it right, the image stops being a postcard and starts being evidence.
Field note from the living north: a reminder that the living world is not a backdrop, but the system we belong to.