I also found it interesting that neither the humans or the animals are perceived as completely "wild" in any of the pictures, though the "wildness" of each can be debated. The series shows human confrontation with the "wild" today, and how drastically it has changed due to the far reach of domestication and also technology. My personal favorite photo was the last, with the wolf howling at the streetlight, not only for its beauty in symmetry and contrast, but also the content. This photo, like many of the others in the series, shows the same confusion that animals have in this day and age in their own perception of what is natural. The human influence over nature has greatly affected animals everywhere, as they have to adapt to the situations that we inflect on their own habitats.
I really loved Amy Stein's Domesticated series, as not only was each photo interesting in the natural sense, it was also an amusing way to see how much our natural world as humans intertwines with the world of animals. I was slightly puzzled by the photos that didn't include any animals though, like 8, 13, and 21. Are these photos simply representing our influence on the natural habitats of these animals? Is it a more powerful statement that animals weren't included in the photos? And are the birds in photo 6 really taxidermied? Is the fact that these animals are taxidermied that prevalent to the overall meaning of the series?
Isabella: I enjoyed your analysis of the last picture which depicted a wolf staring at a street light in the middle of the night. I always, somewhat, believed that animals would know the difference of lamp light and regular light, but your insight made me realize of how confusing it actually is for an animal. The picture does depict the streetlight as a possible moon with the dark night surrounding it so a wolf would be lured towards it.
ReplyDeleteI believe that the birds are taxidermy. It is a great picture of how nature and urban life collides as the birds are picking away at fast-food products. Thinking this picture is made up of real birds really brings out the notion of how we are used to seeing this collision in everyday life but don’t really think anything of it.
Isabella: You're wise to see your own confusion over the status of these animals as part of the motivation for the project. I do think Stein's decision to use taxidermic specimens was more than a practical one (i.e. stuffed animals are easier to manipulate than real ones). For me, the animals themselves, as well as the scenes in which they are portrayed, force you to look twice. In other words, they create in the viewer an important "double-take" because they hover right on the edge of possibility/impossibility and real/unreal.
ReplyDeleteThanks also for pointing to the photos that seem to lack taxidermied animals. I still think these photos belong in the series, because they speak to the theme of "domestication." 21, for instance, portrays a housewife in her front yard filling an artificial birdbath, in front of a house that sports a country-style rooster weathervane. So not only are there symbolic animals present in the scene, but this typical "domestic" scenario points to the unnaturally natural spaces that are our homes and yards, and our desires to see wild things come into those spaces.
Sorry for like being a leech but I can't post anything on this website for some reason, all I can do is comment, so I am going to post my post for this week as a comment to your post. Sorry again.
ReplyDeleteEnvironmental Racism
Environmental racism is a very interesting topic because it branches off into so many different fields and issues. The aspect of environmental racism demonstrated in the reading, Dumping in Dixie, was at a national level, where the main actors were blacks, whites, Hispanics, and government officials. However, what I would like to talk about is environmental racism at a global level, where the actors are developing countries and developed countries. At the global level environmental racism is not about the placement of hazardous waste but of the removal of resources. In the national level the placement of certain companies and facilities led to the public health of certain groups, elderly, blacks, Hispanics, and youth, being threatened. At a global level the removal of resources, such as freshwater, oil, wood, charcoal, and diamonds, as well as the methods used to obtain these resources by developed countries have led to the health of citizens in developing countries being threatened as well as providing them for the most part a poor life.
A field that environmental racism jumps into is history. As Robert Bullard, the author of Dumping in Dixie, stated in his novel the Environmental Justice Movement is a pretty recent phenomenon but environmental racism is not. Environmental racism in the United States has existed for over three hundred years since the so-called founding of America. Native Americans were displaced from their land by colonist because of the richness and fertility of the soil and given barren land. Africans were removed from their homeland where the living in very exquisite conditions and taken to America where they were placed in slave quarters, which were horrible to live in, while their masters slept in comfy beds in their giant houses where they had clean water, food, warmth, and all the necessities and desires of life. Slaves did not have that and were denied those living conditions well after slavery because of the laws passed as well as racial discrimination in housing. Environmental racism is more than what Dumping in Dixie talked about. It dives into several fields of studies and several issues that are historical and contemporary.
Keenan: we'll get your blog privileges fixed eventually! For now, let me say that you are right to point to environmental racism's applicability on an international scale, though I would say that it is about the placement of hazardous waste AND the removal or resources. It has been said that if you are a country that exports raw materials (sugar cane, wood pulp, etc.) and imports finished ones (refined sugar, paper, etc.), you are likely the poorer and worse for wear.
ReplyDeleteI also like your extension of the environmental racism concept to a broader historical scope, including European colonial treatment of native Americans. Such treatment continued through the twentieth century, for instance in the placement of hydroelectric and floodwater dams, e.g. the Garrison Dam in North Dakota (read about its effect on local tribes here).
To expand your consideration of slavery and the Middle Passage, I recently read some work by Alan Bewell, who has written about colonial disease and the massive loss of life on the part of poor white European males conscripted into military service during that era. This is not to trivialize the clear injustices of colonial projects, but to also consider the huge death tolls incurred by sailors and soldiers sent from England and Europe to places like the West Indies.