Photographers play with light. However, being in nature when capturing an image involves playing with sound. How can a photographer convey sound? I suppose viewers add crashing when looking at waves, chirping when seeing bird images, or buzzing with bee pictures. And silence?
Great Sand Dunes National Park, Colorado
I posted some images from Great Sand Dunes National Park in April just after Chance and I spent the night there. One of my strongest experiences and memories from Jane and my visit there in 1983, was the silence when hiking up the dunes. With no wind there was no sound. No sound except hearing your heart beat!
Some of my most indelible memories in national parks are of sounds. The startling, somewhat frightening, blare of elks trumpeting at Fossil Butte National Monument under the Milky Way. The clicks and flaps of bats flying just feet overhead at Carlsbad Caverns National Park. The chorus of frogs and insects that made me want to listen and not sleep while camping along the shore of the river at Obed National Wild and Scenic River.
The National Park Service has an entire division called Natural Sounds and Night Skies. The NPS was created in 1916 through passage of the Organic Act. The Park Service summaries that law:
The Organic Act establishes and authorizes the National Park Service "to conserve the scenery and the national and historic objects and the wildlife therein and to provide for the enjoyment of the same in such manner and by such means as will leave them unimpaired for the enjoyment of future generations." For NPS, the acoustic environment or soundscape of park units is considered a park resource requiring the same level of protection as any other resource (air, water, wildlife, cultural resources, etc).
Several years ago, I posted about one of my most fortunate and amazing encounters while hiking in the Hoh rainforest at Olympic National Park. It started with sound. I was photographing a woodpecker while listening to it hammering into a tree, calling, and flying. In the distance I heard someone walking—the first and only persons I’d encounter hiking on that trail. Looking in the direction of the sound, the first vision was startling: the man had a human head atop his tripod. You can follow the link above to see how the encounter went.
After meeting Emmy winning sound recordist and ecologist Gordon Hempton, I bought his book One Square Inch of Silence. One chapter of the book includes a trip he took with poet Jay Salter among the red rocks and rock art in Utah’s Canyonlands National Park. He quoted Salter:
“I’ve always been interested in sound in poetry, not just rhyming, which can become singsong, but working with the vowel or consonant shape of the sounds and how you can string them together. . . When we were an earlier culture we were more in tune with the sonic aspects of literature, of poetry, of song. . . . I’m very obsessive about finding poets who really honor the experience of the land. . . I think a lot of that is missing from modern poetry because we’ve lost a connection with place, a connection with land—the kind of connection we’re feeling here tonight, with the wind rustling here through the tamarisk and the willow. . . The light’s starting to die and we’re becoming aware that we are going to be in this place without any light, without any streetlights. We’ll have moonlight, but it becomes a totally different world that we have to be attentive to and listen to. It has its own rhythm.”
Gordon Hempton, One Square Inch of Silence pgs 148-149 (2009).
In my Travel Tuesday posts I wrote about Ancestral Puebloan rock art and Craig Childs’ book Tracing Time. In searching for petroglyphs and pictographs in the Colorado Plateau, Childs shares a secret that he pays attention to the acoustics of the land. He has discovered the rock art is often plentiful where sounds also concentrate. Hempton notes that Salter, who is also a sound recordist, makes a connection with this ancient rock art:
“But what I experience here has to do with that life-changing experience I had listening to the sounds that first night I was here. This is very hard to describe, but—this rock is so old and it’s so beautiful. There are paintings on it done by people who lived here, connecting with the land. The rock is red, the color of flesh, and it was flesh for the people who lived here. . . I find it inspiring to return to a place where I can find art, I can find evidences of a people who lived in a very direct way, and where I can find few evidences of the modern world. . . It’s enlivening, it’s awakening to be here, to be relying on these capacities which we don’t often get to use in the civilized world. Especially our senses. We’re using our senses all the time out here. . . So when I started recording here six years ago, I went back to try to capture, as if I was doing a petroglyph, my experience of that moment, with all the things that were funneling into it: the cycles of the weather, the day and night, the season, the animals’ movements. All of these things that are increasingly rare and more and more endangered, I find here in plentitude and I’m renewed, apprehending them, in all the senses of the word apprehending.
Gordon Hempton, One Square Inch of Silence p 149 (2009).
