Camera Trap Poetics
The constraints give rise to the signs of life, and through the work of living, as in the work of art, there must be no goal except to go on living, to go on making, and to find in the preparation for making art, the art itself, and in the preparation for dying, the art of living. What counts for species survival counts for art’s survival: Both explore the conditions of our existence.
Nature has given rise to the camera because seeing and being seen is older than sight. Each living creature is opaque and forever open to interpretation. We refract the light shining onto us towards others, who refract this light further and further, on and on, and finally into the darkness.
Each of the following scenes offer views onto the Santa Monica Mountains. Together, they document a return of the animals to their worlds, to the mountains, to the hills and oak groves, and to the seasons, coming back to life after the great Woolsey Fire. And within these returns are still more returns: the seed to the light, the grass to the wind, the rabbit to the fox, the night to the day, pictures returning to me.
1: In the Beginning there was Fire
The gift of the camera’s presence is our absence from its mystery, a secret exchanged in an instant. Without announcing, these discreet cameras document encounters with something real. Now, here is the entrance to God’s kingdom, peopled by creatures I’ve come to love intimately for their candor, but only and forever from afar. If they need saving, I’m not sure we can save them. My only consolation: In these pictures at least, their world appears complete without me.
2: The Foxtails and the Clouds
How much time elapsed on Earth between the rise of plants and the existence of animals? By best guesses: 42 million years.
What is the difference between a signal and the environment? By best guesses: Just look at the clouds. I feel the wind, and it is the feeling of the world.
The dancing of the grass offers so many vanishing points, and like any good dance, it becomes confusing who’s moving who. I sway. These images create me. I am what I (don’t) see.
When you lie on your back and look up at the sky, there is only the appearance of emptiness, but, of course, the atmosphere is filled with many kinds of gasses. Spiders float in the clouds on balloons made of their webs, a world woven and a world captured.
As a child I would often run through these very same hills. I knew where to find the lizards better than where to find the snakes. My boyhood friend and I, we would pick these same stalks of grasses, preferably when they were green, and we would tie slip knots on their ends to catch “blue bellies.” We often left in the morning and did not come back until sunset.
3: The Fawn
The morning light breaks across the back of the range.
I set the camera in place and then return weeks later to gather what I may have captured. A whole lot of emptiness. Grasses blowing in the wind below floating clouds. And then the fawn reveals himself to me, but only because of my absence. A black box is also strange to deer.
What does he hear with those big ears? The ears of the Mule, which is why this species is called the Mule Deer (Odocoileus hemionus).
The mystery of a “photograph” is the mystery of life: Images, like species, are never finished until the end. We wake up every morning and try to improve ourselves, faithfully, almost automatically, a tendency we share with all of the living.
If they need saving, I’m not sure we can save them. My only consolation: In these pictures at least, their world appears complete without me.
We are setting these cameras over the entire mountain range, for weeks and months now. For years on end, we will continue with devotion to better understand the effects of the great Woolsey Fire. The data is captured on the wings of chance, but not alone. We place the cameras where a program tells us is random, to ensure the objectivity of the set, like “a net with no fisherman,” and yet after a while, I began to feel somehow that nothing is random.
My presence is my own. Does the deer have a soul? What a silly question. How could I have taken this picture without him?
4: Fox Rock
To commune in the white space outside of the frame is to use our imaginations. The image is created by what we see, but also by what we don’t. Scents waft in the air. The visible and the invisible are intimately related. The sensual world unlocks the supra-sensual.
I experience Fox Rock through the eyes of the Gray Fox (Urocyon cinereoargenteus) but also the California Pocket Mouse (Chaetodipus californicus), who live on top of one another, but rarely see each other. My mood is the mood of the scene: Everyone needs to eat.
To survive as a mouse living under Fox Rock is nothing short of a miracle. In some moments, the predators are so close they appear to be overlapping, a trick of the eye. The space between the two pictures can mean anything: just a moment, or many hours, or even more than one day.
A fox noses down around the rock sniffing for the mouse, and then in the next frame, the mouse is there freely foraging for grain. Time withdraws to the nearby Pacific Ocean like a river. The mouse is there and then it is not there. Something is taken in a mouth of flesh and fur. The melodrama of prediction. The many moods of home. A world of many colors and speeds.
5. Cat and Mouse (Jerry)
When I went to check a camera in the far Westerlies of the Santa Monica Mountains with Chloe, the graduate student scientist who organized this camera trap survey, she told me about all the work it took to undertake a camera trap project of this scale. She trained a core group of volunteers to place the cameras across the mountain range in randomly generated locations.
When a “camera hand” arrived at the GPS point, they would then have to find a suitable place for the camera within a close range of the pin.
The volunteers were told to place the cameras where they would be most likely to capture evidence of animals, and so they were often placed on saddlebacks or in dry creek beds or looking upon those “desire paths” of fainting grasses faintly falling in two directions. Even still, no matter how delicately the cameras were placed, there is no telling what might be captured.
And since the ultimate scientific purpose of these camera trap surveys is to conduct “occupancy modeling,” to see how animal populations may have shifted their habitat use in the wake of the Woolsey Fire, where specifically these cameras are placed deeply matters.
This placing of cameras is a scientific ritual, strung together by a community of scientists and volunteers. We cannot ask how these images would be taken without these volunteers either, who are the spider’s web to the image fly.
6: The Cloudy Eye
The relationship between body and soul appears most clearly when we consider animals.
Susan Howe, quoting Godard, who is quoting Artaud, said, “I want soul to be body, so they won’t be able to say that the body is soul, because it will be the soul which is body.”
The nasty and innocent weeds circle and circle, almost aimlessly, and yet they cannot escape their fate. The owl dances on its prey. The coyote with the cloudy eye looks you in the face. Time runs uphill like a river. You will never see this animal again.
When these images were first “scored” by humans, they were uploaded to the website “Zooniverse,” and the National Park Service put out a call to the public to help sort the images. Volunteers from all over the world logged in to click through the images, sorting them into general species categories. When an individual photo received seven indications of its kind, then that photo would be given the tag “Cotton Tail Rabbit,” “Coyote,” Mule Deer,” and so on.
The mystery of a “photograph” is the mystery of life: Images, like species, are never finished until the end.
If this is a collective human vision, a participatory science experiment, I find it quite beautiful. It’s also, however, an activity increasingly colonized by machines. The ultimate goal for the machines is to create generalizable models that could identify any species in any environment. But, as computer vision specialist and NPS collaborator Dr. Sara Beery told me, the models are good at detecting animals, bad at detecting species, and really bad at detecting rare species.
To help the machines with their task, the cameras must remain completely still. If the camera is moving, then it is difficult for the machines to discern the figure from the ground, the animal from the brush, the signal from the environment.
Like a tick, the camera sits patiently, lying in wait, until triggered into action. The tick and the machine are not looking for much. Warmth, movement, temporary dislocation, whose prize is surprise.
7: Peace
8: The Hunt
In the cultural evolution from trapping wild game with snares to capturing images of wildlife with trail cameras, the poetry of tragedy has metamorphosized into a poetry of comedy.
A trap of any kind is a sudden catastrophe. We laugh at the expense of others, because like a good joke, the trap is a sign of both the predator and the prey. Like a poem, the trap’s meaning is only decipherable in retrospect–only after it has sprung. Its story is one such genre of many that moves us when saying and meaning are not synchronized.
Where does the poetry of candor come from? The camera reveals character, but more importantly, it reveals the instantaneous relationship between character and its environment.
9: Canidae Family
“What were the secrets of the animal’s likeness with, and unlikeness from man? The secrets whose existence man recognized as soon as he intercepted an animal’s look?” asks John Berger. in his essay Why Look at Animals? The animal, writes Berger, was likely the first subject of our paintings, which were likely painted with a common substance: blood. What animals and man shared, then, also revealed what differentiated us. This primal scene is the origin of metaphor.
10: The Interval
There are two moments everyday when light and dark are perfectly in balance. Depending on my mood, sometimes I prefer dusk, other times dawn. In the half-light, the poetry of reality most reveals itself. As a fact? As a form inside of a box? As time in the form of a fact? As life impressed upon a record of existence? As anonymous truth? “Is it possible that I too am acting out a role? The role of seeker after truth? Do I truly seek the truth? Perhaps this too is a mask.”
In the interval, the uncertainty of appearances overwhelms us, and this is when the rabbits come out to graze. I am the camera, and I am the rabbit. Confusion is the first articulation of the “I”. Cinema was maybe invented to look at animals, but it’s much better suited to look at time. How long is the Now of a rabbit?
You alone are real to me. You alone are real to me. Behind this change in tonality is a tragic leap in thinking, the rigor of objectivity, the double absence of the trap.
As dawn turns to morning, color reappears to the world and I cease to project my darkest fantasies. Daylight gives man the pious supremacy of his distinction. Even so, we will continue to look at images of animals in the dark, where God’s tiny creatures are endlessly improvising. If today we too are captured, what it means to be captivated still remains to be seen.
Featured image: An owl’s wings flap before a camera at night. This still is part of Signs of Life, composed by Chase Niesner.
The images appearing in “Signs of Life” were collected by scientists and volunteers working with the National Park Service of the Santa Monica Mountains, and were originally shared with me by Chloe Nouzille, when we were both graduate students in the Blumstein Lab at UCLA. Today the cameras are still in the mountains, as efforts to better understand how wildlife are responding to wildfires continues. The music for this iteration of “Signs of Life” was written and performed by After Enya (Matthew Doyle and Chris McKelway) and Georgia Lill. The visual scenes were composed and performed by Chase Niesner. Special thanks to Luis Motta for hosting our first performance at ATTOM in Los Angeles, and to Miroslava Mungia Ramos for continuing support with data sharing and future performance organization.
Chase A. Niesner is an anthropologist and filmmaker conducting research on multi-species relations, media praxis, the politics of belonging, and the history of science. Currently he is a postdoctoral research fellow in the Echeverri Lab at UC Berkeley, where he studies river restoration and mediatized ecologies. Chase grew up in the Santa Monica Mountains and today lives between Berkeley, CA, and Santa Fe, NM. Contact.
