What Is Organic Photography?
Organic photography acknowledges the healthy and sustainable relationship that people can have with the living world.
Organic photography is something I thought of while on the road with the blues and roots band Grace Potter And the Nocturnals. We spent long stretches of time driving from one show to the next, traversing this grand country from ghettos to farmland, from plains to mountain range, from deserts to the deep blue Pacific.
I couldn’t help but notice, even on the most remote of county highways, the endless signs of human influence on the landscape. A crumbling stone wall edging its way along the spine of a ridge, an old school house with a hole in the roof alone in the
middle of waving fields of grain, the skeleton of a rusting tractor surrounded by dry sun parched desert, an endless horizon of smokestacks darkening the evening sky, a large wind farm with huge white turbines glistening in early morning dew.
Only once do I remember looking out across a vast stretch of Earth and not seeing humanity’s touch; that was gazing through the twilight into the hypnotic depths of the Pacific Ocean. Then, I noticed, far out on the distant horizon in that wavy purgatory between sky and sea, the intervalled blinking of a buoy marker.
Organic photography has the ability to show us truths about our relationship to the land and our environs, a reality that
may be difficult to admit as that relationship is many times more destructive than we realize. But, it can also reveal healthier and more sustainable models for co-existing with the world we all share.
At its essence, Organic Photography depicts ways in which humans are conscious of their impact on and connection to the greater world around them. Organic photography strives to show human action in the world as it can be: compassionate, loving, sustainable, healthy, fecund, while measuring these ideals against the reality of human action in many places around the world as it is: destructive.
Much is being said in our current age about the destructiveness of human relationship with the living world and with each other. All one has to do is turn on the television or pick up a newspaper to be bombarded with the great human affected change gripping
our home earth. Global Warming, Human Affected Climate Change, Acid Rain, Too Many Landfills, Ground Water Pollution, Air Pollution, Over Consumption, Mercury Contamination of Fish, Habitat Destruction, Widespread Species Extinction, Forests Disappearing, Deserts Growing, Wars being Waged to control natural resources such as Water and Oil …
It is enough to make even the most well spirited of us feel a deep, penetrating sadness.
We need examples of ways to live our lives
in better balance with the world we all share. Organic photography is a way of communicating healthier relationship. To see images and examples of people interacting peacefully with each other, living in relative security and in balance with the world they depend upon, can serve as a much needed framework for understanding the role each of us play in contributing to the destruction we hear about and experience, while offering ecologically minded alternatives to simple decisions we all make everyday.
Andrew Burdick Photography