Face of a Dead Bird — Notes on grief, spectrality and wildlife photography

Hugo Reinert (1)

1 EHI - Estonian Institute of Humanities

My concern in the present essay lies with exploring the possibility of grief for the loss of a nonhuman animal beyond the cozy domestic assemblages where such grief is conventionally situated, some might say confined. Parallel to the entangled intimacy of pets, livestock and companion species, I am interested in developing (or recuperating) a notion of grief for the nonhuman stranger — for an unknown other, remote but specific. Situating this possibility within the visual economy of conservation, the essay begins with a specific photograph of one nonhuman individual — now dead — and ends with another. The first image is read against Roland Barthes' moving meditation on photography and the death of his mother, Camera Lucida. The links between haunting, photography and spectrality that this text throws up then form the coordinates for the remainder of the argument — which, through a combination of theoretical reflection and ethnography, addresses itself to one central question (perhaps two): does the nonhuman have a face? Did this nonhuman have a face? The essay closes on a hopeful note, identifying the disruptive potential of nonhuman photography to render manifest modes of perception that are not yet supported, that are still virtual — transforming, in other words, the spectrality of the nonhuman photograph into a promissory condition, foreshadowing new economies of being and, possibly, of loss.

Keywords: Conservation; Extinction; Wildlife; Spectrality; Photography; Birds

Domains: Social Anthropology and ethnology; History, Philosophy and Sociology of Sciences

Hugo Reinert. Face of a Dead Bird — Notes on grief, spectrality and wildlife photography. Rhizomes, 2012, 23, no pagination. ⟨hprints-01094372⟩