Transcript for the Piece Audio version of The Camera and Conservation

?Sounds of motordrive
?In photography school, instructors taught us all about light and composition, but very little about relationships. (Shutter sound and photo crew talking) After graduation, as a photographic assistant in New York, I had the good fortune to followed some of my favorite photographers around the world. (Photographer: So, we like to do here two shots. . .) We shot in the jungles of Borneo and on the beaches of Bora Bora. We snapped our way through the Phillipines, the Swiss Alps, and Death Valley. But we seldom developed relationships with the places we photographed. (Photographer: The most difficult thing for me is the light.) Time was tight, deadlines non-negotiable, and the imperative to bring back stunning, singular images often eclipsed everything else. We were, in a sense, blinded by our own visual ambition. So, when I heard that a photographer had damaged Delicate Arch?possibly the most frequently photographed icon of the desert Southwest?I was saddened but not surprised.
?Intro Music . . . From Kuer News in Salt Lake City I'm Mikael Havey. A photographer who lit fires under Delicate Arch during a workshop has changed his plea to guilty on seven federal misdeamenors. Each charge against Michael Fatali of Springdale carries a fine of up to $5000 and six months in prison. Fatali originally plead innocent after setting a series of fires to demonstrate a nightime lighting technique to ameture photographers. The fires have discolored the red sandstone around the arch and may prove impossible to remove. 19.13
?This stuff right here, that's rabbit brush and this is four-wing salt bush. 1; 49:03 Karen
?Ranger Karen McKinlay-Jones, of Arches National Park, is pointing out the plants we're passing along the trail to Delicate Arch. She investigated the Fatali case and has agreed to show me the damage done by the photographer's fires. As we climb uphill through spectacular redrock sandstone, Karen reminds me of the good things art and photography have done for the National Parks.
?My first views of Yellowstone were Thomas Moran, his paintings. And so beginning with those early prtrait artists and then people like Ansel Adams . . . all these people have encouraged people to come to parks. . . . And sometimes if I sound harsh about commercial filming or whatever, I always have to go back to the idea that it was through art, be it painting or sketches or photography that the national parks have become even more popular and accessible to the public. 1; 57:58
?After a good forty-five minutes, the trail narrows to an icy ledge of sandstone. Karen carefully steps to it's far end, then stops and turns toward me. She wants to catch my expression as I round the final corner and suddenly see Delicate Arch for the first time.
?Me: Laughing. Geez. Amazing. 1; 79.26 Guy
?Me: No matter how many pictures of a place you see, it never prepares you for the real thing. It's unbelievable. 1;79:26 Guy
?Like I said, I've been up here probably over a thousand times. I still get gooesebumps. I still love watching people as they come around the corner and they see it and they're just blown away.
?It's an elegantly surreal sight, this perfect arch perched on the edge of a sheer cliff. Edward Abbey said that if Delicate Arch has any significance it lies in its power to reawakened our awareness of the wonderful."
?Let's go over and take a look. 1; 81:15 Karen
?The park service has spent many thousands of dollars restoring the arch. And from a distance you wouldn't notice anything was wrong. But close up you can see the work hasn't erased all the evidence of the fires that where set here, even though they were lit over a year ago.
?It spread from where I'm standing here in front of me and all the way up to where you can see that dark spot on the rock. (Me: Wow. Much bigger than I thought.) You know, we averaged it to about two to three feet wide . . . Karen
?Karen assures me that the fires were an abberation. In the 18 years she's worked here, she's never seen anything else like it.
?Shutter clicking. One thousand one, one thousand two . . . 3; 33:43 Steve
?Not far from Delicate Arch, landscape photographer Steve Mulligan is counting off a long exposure he's making in Canyonlands National Park. He shakes his head at the thought of damaging a landscape to get a picture of it. But he knows it's happened before in the town where he once lived.
?In a small city park in Colorado Springs there are a couple hundred of these one-seed junipers, which are old, they're a couple thousand I think. Oh, that's bright. . . They are some of my favorite trees in the world. 35.13 Steve
?Several years ago a photographer used those trees as his subject, but along with a camera he carried another piece of equipment?a saw.
?. . . he was cutting off big branches so no one else could recreate his photo, as though all these trees hadn't been photographed thousands of times. 38.01 Steve
?Steve lives in nearby Moab, Utah, a town flanked not only by Arches and Canyonlands, but by chunks of beautiful country overseen by the Bureau of Land Management. Countless movies, commercials, music videos, and magazine ads have been shot here. Crews have helicoptered SUVs onto buttes and turned redrock monuments into mammoth beer cans. Not exactly what Ansel Adams would have pictured, but big commerical productions infuse isolated towns like Moab with jobs and cash.
?Our office issues anywhere from 40 to 50 permits a year . . . 5; 1.25 Mary
?Mary Von Koch supervises film and photo shoots for the BLM office in Moab.
?The shoots that I think have the most impacts are movies . We generally have anywhere from a hundred and twenty to three hundred people on set, if we have extras . . . So there definitely can be environmental impacts in the desert from having that many people and equipment on location, but for the most part you could go out you really do not see impacts to this area that are specific from filming. 5; 1.25 Mary
?One movie filmed a scene with 350 stampeding horses
?. . . and the lands from that are still reclaiming themselves. But it's a slow process. And we knew that with shallow soils and our low percipitation that it was going to be a while. 5; 20:49 Mary
?(City Slicker II soundtrack: Stampede!)
?The movie was City Slickers II with Billy Crystal filmed here in 1993. Local conservationists weren't at all happy about this stampede scene. They also accused the film crew of building an unauthorized road in a protected wilderness area and dumping contaiminated water into a local drainage.
?There has to be a balance between the environment and the economy. 4; 7:44 Bette
?Bette Stanton, former head of the Moab Film Commission, bristles at accusations leveled at Hollywood by people she calls extreme environmentalists. After all, if camera crews hadn't been here to bolster the economy, Moab would've been in big trouble when it's uranium mine closed. Yet, she says environmentalists are pushing the industry away by demanding tighter restrictions on filming and lobbying to turn one of her favorite locations into a wilderness areas.
?I'll be damned if they didn't designate that whole cotton pickin' area as proposed wilderness. Now of all the country, that's the easiest for film companies to get to . . . This is where they have been through all these years they've been able to go into and do all of this filming and all of a sudden it's proposed wilderness which suddenly it put the breaks on and we've had to find somewhere else to film. . . . 4;12:50 Bette
?I think that line of thinking isn't concious of the actual environmental impacts that are very real in filming?either commercials or films or even still photography. 4; 55:42 55.42 Herb
?Herb McHarg works for the Southern Utah Wilderness Alliance, a group fighting to get The American Redrock Wilderness Act through Congress. He challenges film permits whenever he believes those shoots threaten public lands. But Herb worries that the images themselves might do more lasting damage.
?. . . When a commerical shows sports utility vehicles, trucks, and ATVs crashing through streambeds, through potholes, through vegetations and sensitive soils, and then members of the public see those things occuring, then they want to go out and use those same machines out on public lands. You wouldn't think of filming a vehicle crashing through Central Park, let's say, in New York . . . but that's exactly what's happening out here in these wild landscapes. 4; 55:42 55.42 Herb
?(Woman looking for book in bookstore) Do you have any books on antiques and all that stuff? Jose: I usually have the Covels. . . 2; 25:36
?Jose Knighton, the manager and book buyer at Back of Beyond Books in Moab, thinks that nature photography impacts culture in even more sublte ways. (Thank You.) He began thinking about it when a photographer friend walked into the store one day looking for a calendar.
?And I said lets go back in the back where I have all the landscape calendars, and lets look at this years crop of eco-porn. The phrase just popped out of my mouth. And the more I started examining it, the more relevant it actually seemed. I started looking at landscape photography in the way you would look at foldouts from Playboy, the very selective precision with which somebody has posed the landscape . . . 2; 4.41 Jose
?Jose wrote an essay that was picked up by Harper's. It created a stir in the photographic community.
?The phrase that came up in my article was beefing up the bosom of the Grand Tetons. (laughing) 2; 4.41 Jose
?And in the same way that glamour photography distorts our view of women, Jose believes landscape photography can distort our view of nature.
?Somebody's looking at this glamorous photograph of the Grand Tetons in sunset light with storm glow and everything, and you realize what you're not seeing is out there on the plains around the Tetons you've got fences that are blocking off the migration of antelope herds and wind up getting trapped against those fences in blizzards and starving to death. There needs to be some way of balancing those manipulative, glamourous images with what is really going on on the landscape. 2; 31.18 Jose
?(Sounds in darkroom class) Well under here it looks a little flat to me. What do you have in terms of a filter? . . . 5; 95:50 Bruce
?Bruce Hucko agrees. He stands with his students in the red glow of Moab's Grand County High School darkroom.
?Ben, did you put water in this? Student
? He's teaching his class to make their first photographic prints. But he also hopes to teach them that photography is more than technique, that it should include a respect for what gets centered in the viewfinder. That message is all the more important, Bruce thinks, in light of the fires set by that photgrapher at Delicate Arch.
?And I view his act as though he had taken a razor blade to the face of the person he was photographing. I mean, it's worse than vandalizm 5; 49:30 Bruce
?Surprisingly, a three year old Navajo girl helped teach Bruce a lesson about building relationships between photographer and subject. He was hiking out of a canyon with the young girl riding on his shoulders. Below them, a few of his workshop students were beginning to take pictures.
?And she yelled down to those people, "Are you cheesing the canyon?" And you know at first I went isn't that cute. And then much later I thought about it and I went oh my god, she is so right. What she was saying was Are you on a good rapport with the canyon? Have you put yourself in a situation with the canyon so it's gonna to smile back at you. 5; 46.37 Bruce
?Of course, plenty of photographers work for a good rapport with their subjects. Yet after two decades making a living in photography, I've realized it's not so different than any industry that profits from the natural world, whether it be logging, mining, agriculture, or art. In any of these pursuits we have the choice to see nature as an object to be exploited or?as Ansel Adams did?as a relationship to be nutured, to see not only with eyes, but our hearts and minds.