Mark Amerika, Nature Photographer (3)

Being a nature photographer, one should feel compelled to ask the obvious question, i.e. just what exactly is nature? Is it a sense of measure revealed in scenic circumstance? Who/what transmits it? I don't mean in a religious or even spiritual sense, but rather in regards to subject positioning. My intuition, itself a byproduct of what we must in some way consider the "natural," tells me that nature is in constant flux, or is the is that is constant flux, but that it [nature] also gets rendered in my body as a kind of digital image, one that I unconsciously process when positioning myself in the world. These positions are interrelated to subjective movements and may manifest themselves as physical movement (walking along a trail), dynamic movement (driving through Rocky Mountain National Park), interiorized movement (imaging memory), or even proprioceptive movement (knowing where I am without necessarily seeing where I'm going). In fact, this last one, "proprioceptive movement (knowing where I am without necessarily seeing where I'm going)," may be closer to what nature is than any rudimentary image of colorful trees captured by my Nikon Coolpix camera:



Images shot within walking distance of
Mark Amerika Nature Photography Studio

This is not to minimalize the effect of these beautiful images that I, as artist-medium, have captured. I was there. I know how beautiful these supposed nature scenes are. But the value of the experience is not in the composition nor the fact that I am the one who clicked the camera button at the right moment in time. For me, the value is in the sense of measure my "body-brain-apparatus achievement" conducted while clicking.

Does this mean I, as an artist-medium participating in clickual reality, am a rogue denaturalizer of everything beautiful while I am succumbing to the logic of invention and colonizing digital space?

The artist is a filter whose settings are in constant flux. Proprioceptively becoming a medium that invents their Life Style Practice as they go, the artist as nature photographer is in some ways a creative shaman, an inside-out upside down man who processes (surfs-samples-manipulates) the data for their own pseudoautobiographical uses. For some, it' second nature.

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Metadata: nature, art, photography, philosophy