Jim Brandenburg

Natural History, Dec, 2000

I've always assumed that making images of the natural world, especially of wild animals, is a primal experience, if not second nature, for us two-leggeds. Take the earliest evidence of humankind's attempts at recording a thought or conveying a notion: an image of an animal scratched or drawn on the cold walls of dark sanctuaries. Is my inserting a roll of film into the camera and producing an image of a wolf much different from a Cro-Magnon man's dipping his finger into a swirl of red ocher pigment and painting a lion on the wall of Chauvet Cave 30,000 years ago? What were his motivations? What are mine? And can one really connect these two experiences, so far apart in time?

After thirty years of pondering this question, I've concluded that whether one regards the early artists' skillful depictions as simply documentation of what they saw or as profound, prayerful ritual, the same range of perception and motivation is found in my own "nature art." To try one's hand at producing pictures of animals is, I think, profoundly and uniquely human. I believe that inspiration born of untold numbers of human-animal encounters over countless generations is deeply implanted in our marrow.

Today I pay homage to the animal subjects themselves and to that ancient human tradition as I attempt to conjure what I hope is a similar sympathetic magic. The tool may be a stick of charcoal or a camera, but the desire to become one with the animal world comes from the same place.