Essay for Environmentalist Photographer David Ellingsen whose fine art photographs have been featured in National Geographic Magazine and exhibited in Canada, the USA and Asia.
EXCERPT:
I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived. – Henry David Thoreau, Walden Pond
In an era of radical environmental changes and challenges, artists can play a pivotal role to alert our senses and engage critical thinking about the state – and fate – of the planet at this perilous time. The expressive language of art can often prove more persuasive than factual statistics or media alarm. Artists such as Maya Lin, Joseph Beuys and Ed Burtynsky – among a varied collection of next generation standouts – are changing the terms for what constitutes a landscape artist while inflecting their scenes of the contemporary world with an activist’s agenda.
For Canadian environmental artist David Ellingsen – whose intimate connection with the natural world is rooted in his rural upbringing on a small remote island in the Pacific Northwest – there is a moral imperative as much as a conceptual vision that sparks his work. But his photographs – though cunning and prickly with social concerns – read more as a humanist prayer than political protest. Through the full range of his different photographic series, Ellingsen is documenting what we have, questioning what we are losing and purposefully involving himself in that dialogue between Man and Nature, consumerism and sustainability, life and death.
What we have in this world is biological diversity and ecological beauty – but we are at a high risk of catastrophically diminishing both. In his Sealife and Skylife series, Ellingsen tenderly documents a range of plant and winged life using the darkly expressive potential of Polaroid Type 55 negatives. Finely-grained and lush with moments of exacting clarity, the collection is heartfelt and evocative but also troubling. With changes occurring in ocean temperatures and currents and with ongoing degradation of natural habitats, studies have warned that we are entering a sixth wave of mass extinction. Ellingsen’s work makes you feel the significance of that loss.
Initiated in 2011, Ellingsen’s Weather Patterns turns both a documentary eye and conceptual focus to the ever-changing meteorological impressions he records nearly every day from the same vantage point near his home on Cortes Island. As the weather shifts, softens and blurs out the same minimalist block of sea, land and sky, Ellingsen’s series manifests his archival impulse and environmental concerns but also his artistic habit of telling the truth of hisinner life by looking outward. The conceptual angle to the work – so many individual days chopped up into grids and groupings to connect these patterns with historical significance – give these constructed pieces a compelling visual dynamic. There are many truths to be told in the changing weather.
But it is in his two most recent series – Future Imperfect and The Last Stand – that Ellingsen makes most resonant his conceptual vision and Romantic aesthetic. And each has a personal edge that gives the images a quiet poignancy that is very affecting – and effective. In The Last Stand, Ellingsen’s quietly contemplative scenes of old growth tree stumps are all photographed on his family’s property on Cortes Island – in fact, many were logged by his ancestral family members. Ellingsen cuts a fine line here. The images are intended to question his own culpability in the globalized demand for natural resources that is stripping the earth bare and to present a challenge to viewers about our ecological priorities. But the work feels more elegiac than angry. Shrouded in frail light, these grave markers of natural history appear raw and haunting but also – in their still fecund manner – redemptive. Both our collective guilt and our potential salvation are on view here.
