Last week I took my 15-year-old CPY-BBBS (Committed Partners for Youth/Big Brothers Big Sisters) mentee to see the “Amazonia” exhibit at the Jordan Schnitzer Museum of Art (JSMOA). She is a very creative and talented teen, and we occasionally visit the JSMOA to check out the exhibits to nurture her talents and perhaps inspire her.
Although I am a photographer and have some creative hobbies, I have never considered myself to be an artist. And I am not an art critic. In fact, I’ve been heard to utter the phrase “I don’t believe in art.” So you probably will disagree with everything I say here. After all, what makes “great art” is completely subjective.
We entered the exhibit on the top floor and began to view the pieces on display from Sam Abell and Torben Ulrik Nissen. As the exhibit explains, none of the images were altered after they were taken – not cropped, not digitally adjusted for contrast or light or color, nothing. But they were blown up. Thus, generally what we experienced were a lot of grainy large-scale photographs that showed a muddy, dirty Amazon.
While the artists left the photos in their natural state, showing the animals in their natural context, and allowing the viewer to see everything as closely as they actually saw it, I feel that the images could have used cropping and alteration to better show off their real beauty. In my own experience, my camera does not always capture things the way I see them.
I have had discussions with John Cooney, a local naturalist celebrity who appears regularly on KLCC about this topic, and he says that he doesn’t take photos because they just can’t capture what he sees and experiences. I agree to a point, and with Abell and Nissen’s images, I agree completely.
My mentee’s reaction was nonplussed. She said “these are pretty boring.” I asked her if there were any that she would want to have featured on display in her house, and she said “no, not really.” I had to agree. The natural beauty of the place was just not captured. It felt like I was looking at any tourist’s photo documentary, not the images of artists or even professionals. The other thing I noticed was that the images lacked perspective.
The most striking image to me was of the monkey swimming in the river. You could see the power and size of the river from the image. Two images that come to mind immediately for lacking perspective are the snake in the leaves and the sloth. The sloth image in particular bothered me because the animal was presumably moving slow enough that the photographers could have worked to get a more interesting angle and share some of the character of the animal. Instead it looks like a mud-covered stuffed animal sitting on a river mudflat and has zero charisma.
I was especially disappointed with the images of the Macaws that are featured. One print shows a flock of Macaws flying and roosting on a mud cliff. I had seen an image very similar to this featured on the public television show, Travels to the Edge with Art Wolfe. While you may dismiss the comparison as television versus still photography, I will point out that Art Wolfe is a still photographer, and the images that were displayed that he took of a similar flock had far more movement and beauty.
Lastly, there is the notion about what art is supposed to do: it’s supposed to make you think or react. When you’re sharing images of one of the most precious places on the planet and people leave with grainy muddy images in their heads and they fail to see the beauty of the place, aren’t you failing as an artist to communicate the necessity for protecting and saving it?
Leah Rosin is an information technology (IT) news website editor. She volunteers with Committed Partners for Youth/Big Brothers Big Sisters of Lane County and MECCA. She has also designed and maintained websites for local businesses and offers her photography services to the community. She lives and works in the Santa Clara neighborhood in Eugene.
