Jeremy Starn - Unnatural Nature

'Nature' photography can be seen as means to digest the mysterious. A fulfillment of the desire to capture the wild and tame the weird. In doing so it flattens the round and squishy, and discards the uncontainable wholeness of being. It is not a window onto the world but a mirror of impressed expectations. These flat reflections feed back into lived experience, quietly reshaping how the world itself is encountered. “Nature is dangerous because I have seen a thousand pictures that have told me so.” In quantum mechanics, even remote observation alters what is seen. Through observation and naming, the world is asked to perform: 'A Virgin Forest,' 'The Wild West,' or a 'A Fragile Ecosystem.' What happens when hegemonic normativity becomes the strange, and entanglement, weird and uncomfortable as it is, becomes the norm? Can 'Nature' photography resist its inherent function to capture and consolidate? What happens when the photo is misbehaved? Can it then free the nonhuman from its photographic captivity?