The Delicate Balance of Agency

    Staring at the picture of a beautiful polar bear sniffing at piles of garbage (telephone poles blemishing the otherwise beautiful background), it's hard to think of the image in terms of "ecoporn." On one hand, Welling seems to suggest that there are "structural continuities" between this image and the more straight-forward examples of ecoporn, such as "Shell Oil's pictorial vision of nature" (Welling, pg. 54). Yet some of the major problems he seems to have are illustrated in his example of the beach sunset on pg. 57. He suggests that such images give a sense of "private ownership," while simultaneously operating to "conceal the doubly invisible forms of damage inflicted on the nonrepresented, nonphotogenic landscapes that are logged, mined, damaged, polluted..." (Welling, pg. 57). In this way, the photograph of the polar bear seems to go precisely against Welling's notion of ecoporn. It is specifically attempting to exploit the nonphotogenic, polluted land, so that if we do get any sense of "private ownership" of this land, it is qualitatively different than with standard ecoporn. In this case it becomes more a feeling of private, or even collective, responsibility for the damage we have caused. We are now seeing the otherwise hidden effects of human penetration into the land.

     But in terms of agency, I have a hard time knowing if there IS a difference between the polar bear image and other ecoporn. There are, it seems, still continuities in terms of agency that connect the two, because ultimately, the audience in either case can only see what we are shown. So we have no way of knowing if this picture is more representative of the landscape than one in which the garbage and telephone poles are ignored. It's entirely possible that the landscape is actually quite beautiful, and this bleak angle is an attempt to raise awareness for various environmental advocacy groups. So what seems to be at the heart of this is that there is an implied choice inherent in photographs like these. In other words, we, the audience, are shown a picture, and we are supposedly given a choice as to how we want to react. But whether the picture is portraying a comforting image of serene mountainscapes, or a polar bear rummaging through our garbage, the choice is a fiction. And not only that, but it's a fiction that comes with a moral judgement attached to it. To me, this amounts to a forced shift of agency from one that is ideally shared between author, audience, and nature (or subject), to one that too strongly favors the author at the cost of the other two. In this way, agency feels more like a delicate balance than an outright paradox. But it's a balance that, when upset, becomes glaring like a false light from one of Burke's prisms, as is arguably the case with ecoporn, disability discourse, Campbell's case study of Sojourner Truth, etc.