Jungle Still Lifes
by Helen MolesworthBob Braine's art explores the relationship between man-made and natural habitats, demonstrating how the two are always dependent on each other. For years, he has documented urban wildlife, from raccoons to sparrow hawks, deer to rats. Usually the animals are dead when he takes their pictures, killed by cars, lying at the edge of the road. Braine's photographs of road-kill are not as gruesome as you might think. Instead they show the incredible diversity of species that share our urban habitat--animals we rarely see, much less think about.
Braine took the photographs in the "Jungle Still Lifes" series while he was on a seven-week expedition on the Mazaruni River, in Guyana. His images feature plants, insects, and fish suspended above a luxuriously thick, bluish-black velvet background. The "Jungle Still Lifes" are simultaneously sumptuous works of art and documents, scientific records of specimens that he gathered in the jungle. Like Braine's urban photographs, the series straddles the boundaries between art and science. Or perhaps it would be better to say that the photographs demonstrate the difficulties in separating science and art in the first place: Both systems try to explain and represent the world around us, expressing the insatiable human desire to make sense of it all.
Braine's images, while they look straightforward at first, usually tell several stories at once. Take the photographs "Piranha Head" and "Piranha Head with Ants." In the first image, caught soon after decapitation, the piranha's head glistens with iridescence, the fish's eye a luminous shape hovering at the bottom of the photograph. The second image, "Piranha Head with Ants," tells a different story altogether. Death and decay have removed the reflective sheen from the scales, the eye has clouded over, and of course the ants have moved in. The two photographs show death to be a process rather than a state. Death happens, matter changes during its course, and in so doing death is an integral part of the processes of life. Braine does not offer this idea as a cliche or an abstraction; instead he shows it to be a visible and scientific fact that we usually avoid contemplating during our daily lives.
Some of the "Jungle Still Lifes" focus less on the processes of nature than on the representations of nature. Braine's photographs comment upon the ways that nature is displayed and packaged, and how these displays affect the way people think about the natural world. Braine shows that nature and culture are intertwined and inseparable. In the diptych "Reclining Catfish," for example, a dead fish is placed in two different settings, one a black velvet background, the other a tree stump in the jungle. On the velvet background the fish is completely decontextualized: as an abstract form, the catfish starts to resemble a reclining nude, a piscine version of Manet's famous "Olympia." The second "Reclining Catfish," with its jungle background, forces us to consider where the fish came from, how it lived, and how it ultimately came to be a fish out of water. In these two pictures Braine has made a check-list of sorts, a compilation of the concerns of nature photography: still life, landscape, natural beauty, the human anthropomorphization of animals, and the attempt to show how animals fit into eco-systems. The contrast between the two pictures suggests that representations of nature, or the landscape, are never as simple or value neutral as they appear to be in classic grandiose nature photography, a la National Geographic or Ansel Adams. In effect, Bob Braine makes images with as many layers as his subject matter--the natural world and our representations of it.
