In our cultural history the female body and nature are linked, as objects of male gaze and domination, while the male body’s own involvement with the natural world is seldom considered. Yet it is through our bodies that we as men and women each constitute a part of what is human, and are woven into the environmental fabric of the earth. This work is a response to my realization that the severing of the masculine from the living landscape is one of the ways patriarchy harms both men and women, and contributes to our present environmental crisis. In making it I had to challenge my own male biases and protective mechanisms, and to adopt a strategy “becoming visible”—stepping out from behind the camera and into the landscapes I was photographing.
Becoming visible is not simply about nudity. It is shift away from the (mostly male) perspective that one is ever a disconnected, hidden observer of reality. And it involves consideration of all the ways in which one is seen—and not just by other human beings. In this regard the work also arises from my own long history of transformative experience in, and with, the Mojave Desert. I wanted to depict an intimate and sensual relationship of co-perception between my own body and the plants and other features of the desert landscape. These things emerge not simply as objects of my gaze, but as subjects with their own constellations of perception and centricities of meaning. In the alternation of images I wanted to convey my own perspective on this complex entanglement, the outwardness of perception and the inwardness of things. It is through such relationships of being and being-perceived that our continuity with this world persists.