Nature, Really

I am drawn to visions of nature that are unnatural, so much so that they become accurate to the real strangeness of wilderness. Wildlife photographers get it. They have equipment to capture reality in higher granularity and definition than we can perceive humanly, but which we register somehow, unconsciously, as wonderment, awe, sublime beauty. Through equipment, we give tangible form to this feeling.

For people like me, who have grown up on hours of Nat Geo programming, and in whom images of cheetah-chasing-gazelle, dancing-bird-of-paradise, shimmering-shoal-of-mackerel are hard wired, nature has always been a spectacular drama, televised. I had seen videos of hummingbirds flapping their wings in super-slo-mo countless times before I saw one in real life.

I found a slim photobook Barbizon the other day, cover-to-cover loaded with digitally manipulated nature photographs by French graphic designer Gregoire Becot and printed by Studio H13. The saturation is amped up, hues skewed, the colours are vivid and the pixels are manipulated into blurs and swirls, so that the image in its totality is barely an image, but a refracted impression, literally running off the page. Each photograph is treated differently, so that sometimes it dissolves into big blocks of gaussian blur, sometimes into icy-sharp points. Small windows of the photographs are kept intact here and there, full orange blossoms, ribbed backs of tropical leaves, wispy trees against blue skies, postcards from a past time. The effect is mesmerising. The digital mediation signals not any kind of ironic unravelling, but the reaffirmation of the beauty, humour, drama of nature, really.