No Stillness for Us, You and I Move For the Wind

No Stillness for Us, You and I Move for the Wind is an ongoing performance and analogue photography field practice that documents an expression of empathy between human and tree, as both respond to changes in weather. In their book Tree Cultures: The Places of Trees and Trees in their Place, Jones and Cloke, responding to Michel Serre’s call to breach the divide between nature and culture that has arisen through social contracts, speculate on how considering the agency of trees impacts our ethical relations to more-than-human life.

The photographs are taken among various arboreal/urban spaces and forests around Scotland on 35mm film. The shutter is pressed whilst the human body moves to mirror the direction of the trees' movement as they respond to a change in wind direction. Images were taken without looking through the camera but instead allowing the camera to catch the movement of both trees and the human body as it moved in the direction of the wind, mirroring the trees. This process is inspired by Bridget Crone’s writing on ‘embodied image making’ as the body moves with the atmospheres that affect the other, asking what questions arise when we consider changes in weather from another’s perspective. Crone writes about ‘turbidity’ to describe the ways in which ‘field working with a camera’ becomes ‘a practice of immersion as much as picturing’. Thinking about images and image-making in this way, extends the practice beyond ‘the visual to the sensory and provides a way to recognise the double nature of field working with a camera as an embodied experience and the representation (or measure) of that experience.’ (Crone et al, p.492)

The forms become fluid, like dissolving paint. The images mark a moment of response as the body moves with the atmospheres that also demand a response from the trees. Photography here is is not an act of representation but an attempt to capture through the lens a responsive movement of the human body following the trees. The lens reflects the movement behind it as it mirrors what’s in front of it, becoming an image that is responsive to movement from both angles. By positioning the frame within movement, the photography also implicates the viewer in questions of what and whom is offered empathy; with whom do we practice the ‘arts of attentiveness’ (van Dooren et al) and 'inclusion' (Tsing, 2010), who is part of what we consider our community demanding sympathetic patterns of dialogue and social mirroring between bodies.

However wrapped up in the process is still the question of focus and exclusion. As the camera focuses attention it also cuts out information, cuts out the multispecies connectedness in which the trees are located. As the image draws focus to specific trees, the body becomes at once both more focused on a space and further removed, through the action of seeing through a technological apparatus and the rigid dimensions of the frame. The viewer is implicated in considering how a rigid frame and rigid considerations of divides between nature cultures, human and more-than-human bodies can be crossed and made permeable. There is also obscuration created through this method. The photographs are left untitled, with no information about the location, tree species, day or weather conditions. The movement of the body as the shutter closes obscures as well as reflects something of the moment of the image’s creation.

Although the intention is to draw focus to the trees as they move in the changing wind, the process necessitates the question of whether these images are primarily images of the human body in flux, as it attempts to both respond, empathise and capture all at once. As such, this field working photography practice highlights the permanent presence of the artist as co-subject in works that aim to focus on a non-human other.

References
Cloke, P, Jones, O. Tree Cultures: The Places of Trees and Trees in their Place
Crone, B., Nightingale, S. Stanton, P. (2023) Fieldwork for Future Ecologies: Radical Practice for Art and Art-based Research, Eindhoven: Onomatopee.
Tsing, A. (2010) 'Arts of Inclusion, Or How to Love a Mushroom', Manoa, 2(22), p. 191-203
Vol. 22, No. 2, Wild Hearts: Literature, Ecology, and Inclusion (winter 2010), pp. 191-203 (13 pages)
Published By: University of Hawai'i Press
van Dooren, T., Kirksey, E., Münster U (2016) 'Multispecies Studies: Cultivating Arts of Attentiveness', Environmental Humanities, 8 (1), pp. 1-23.