Tuesday, October 03, 2006

Mark Amerika, Nature Photographer (2)

Of course, what kind of serious nature photographer randomly takes pix with his camera without taking into consideration composition / shutter speed / aperture / exposure / depth of field / resolution and everything else you are taught in art school? I rarely, if ever, take these into account (okay, most of the night shots I took inside the Eiffel Tower two weeks ago forced me to tweak things a bit and yes, those were nature shots too). Perhaps I am not a nature photographer at all, but an unnatural thoughtographer, an alien transgressor of the real who operates in the age of aesthetics, a phantom figure whose signature event is to continuously mark time in commodity culture.

But commodity culture wears different masks. For example, shopping this past weekend at Boulder's organic farmers' market, with over 30 stalls from all over Colorado and where this time of year we can buy enormous bunches of red chard, rainbow chard, green chard, tatsoi, collard greens, carrots, curly kale, dinosaur kale, red russian kale, and endless bags of tomatoes, onions, green beans, green peppers, red peppers, yellow peppers, purple peppers, potatoes, squash (delicata, butternut, spaghetti, etc.), pumpkin, melon, apples, pears, plums, local goat and Camembert cheeses, Rocky Mountain red wines, 10-12 varieties of herbal soap from the Hemp Lady, and on and on. This is different than, say, filling up your SUV with gas from Iran or Saudi Arabia (if you own an SUV then the kindly Nature Photographer has two words for you: fuck off!).

Are these two images, captured ten minutes outside of my art studio, to be considered nature photography too?



Images of Boulder Farmers' Market shot by
Mark Amerika Nature Photography Studio


How can I put it? It's in my very nature to remix (culturally compost) the organic food I eat and that is grown in the local environment I stroll through with the multi-layered "scenic resources" I surround myself with not to mention the self-correcting environmental system that circulates inside my body as it fluctuates through various states of affectivity.

Is this what it means to feel natural?


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