“Mr Rodriguez strongly denied that the wolf was a trained animal,” the BBC News reported on January 20.
Nonetheless Jose Luis Rodriguez was stripped of his first-place price for the Wildlife Photographer of the Year, the judges disqualifying him based on his subject probably being a “model,” even though they had already awarded Rodriguez first prize in October 2009 — out of 43,000 competition entries.
Frankly, I don’t really care about the politics of this particular competition debacle. But the story grabbed my attention because — to me, before reading the article — the photograph of the jumping wolf rang out as staged.
I didn’t think, “The photographer staged this image.” It was just a gut reaction.
I often see “candid” images that reek of a certain falseness, and I have seen many documentary images that I know are not contrived but that somehow seem contrived. So goes one of the many inherent contradictions in photography: to make something look “natural” often takes more staging than to make something look “staged.”
These ideas are nothing new to thinking about photography, but since I began writing for “Currents,” the magazine of the North American Nature Photographers Association (NANPA), three years ago, I have been given nature photography a lot more thought.
Having not thought that much about nature photography before I began writing on the topic, I suppose I assumed (like the people in an uproar over Mr. Rodriguez’s image?) that “nature photography” was somehow related to “pure, unadulterated” nature, whatever that might be.
In interviewing scores of great nature photographers, one thing I have come to learn in how much work goes into making a image look like it was plucked from nature without the least bit of interference — even if the “interference” was extreme, if only in locating the animal in a preserve rather than it’s natural habitat.
On the other hand, I have talked to photographers like Joel Sartore who put a great deal of work into staging images in the name of documenting vanishing species. No ethical qualms there.
What Is Nature Photography to You?
And while I could go on with this post, I really did want to just put this question out to you. What is “nature photography”? What is it to you, what is it as a category of photography? How does it relate and interrelate to other, not-obviously connected specialties?
In some ways it seems that the specialty of “nature photography” deserves a lot more attention than many of us give it. But before I go off on that tangent, maybe you can do so for me. What’s “nature photography” to you — both in its nature and in the nature of the way we see it?