As he stood in front of his photograph of an Amazon jaguar, Danish wildlife photographer Torben Ulrik Nissen realized most of his work from the past six years, made in the world’s largest rainforest, came down to good fortune.
“It was mostly luck,” Nissen said. “You could spend years in the Amazon and never see (a jaguar).”
Torben met National Geographic photographer Sam Abell in the Amazon while Abell was on commission to take pictures for an ecology book, promoting the value of the rainforest and why it should be saved. Both went back several times over the course of six years and decided to collaborate on the exhibition, called Amazonia, opening at the Jordan Schnitzer Museum of Art tomorrow evening.
JSMA Executive Director Jill Hartz called it an “unexpected opportunity that really affected the project,” because of each photographer’s expertise in photography.
They continued to return to the Amazon, getting more images they had yet to collect and forging into different areas of Peru and Bolivia, into the headwaters of the Amazon.
Abell described the Amazon as “a large circulatory system” with small capillaries wandering away from “the mighty arteries of the Amazon itself.” Abell said he and Nissen mostly walked up and down the capillaries searching for wildlife.
The art exhibit will feature more than 50 full-color photographs and commentary by Abell, with additional photos and text by Nissen.
Tomorrow, the museum will hold an opening reception at 6 p.m., featuring traditional Peruvian music by Tito Amaya.
Through six years of taking photographs, Abell and Nissen can provide rare insight into the remote and untouched landscape of the Amazon rainforest and all its inhabitants, Hartz said.
“The key word is ‘encounters’,” Abell said. “All throughout the exhibition, the photographs represent encounters, and we would photograph them in a specific way, and that way was not as portraits, but as animals within a world. And that is why the exhibit is called Amazonia, which means not just the Amazon, but the world that lives in the Amazon.”
Abell said he wants viewers of the exhibit to feel drawn in to the picture, and also to have “within yourself, a subconscious feeling of authenticity, that you are standing there.”
Out of all his photography excursions, Abell said that the Amazon was the most difficult to capture.
“The Amazon is a visually and physically claustrophobic place, and photographers don’t go to the Amazon because it’s a difficult place to photograph,” Abell said. “In my 30-year career, this is the hardest place I have worked and the hardest place to make interesting photographs.”
Nissen agreed.
“It’s a mess, and total chaos,” Nissen said.
But both realize that because it is difficult, that is what makes it beautiful and so important
to society.
“When the Amazon goes down, the last great forest will be gone, and with it, all its life,” Abell said.
The photographs capture species that are rarely seen, or so fast that it is almost impossible to photograph them.
“You want to be ready for the moment, whatever it is,” Nissen said. “And sometimes the moment never arrives, and you have to chase the moment.”
Hartz has been working with this exhibit since her former job as director of the University of Virginia’s art museum, where she found the exhibit so captivating that she worked with Abell and the Oakwood Foundation to keep the show and move it to other universities.
“I think there are two messages,” Hartz said. “One is that photography is a really important art form, and the other is that most of us won’t ever get there, and we all hear about the Amazon and this is what it’s like; and it is good that we don’t go there, otherwise we would destroy it.”
Descriptions of the exhibition, the catalogue and an audio tour have been translated into Spanish, and though the exhibit itself starts Sunday, Abell and Nissen will be back on campus for further events with the exhibit in March.
Hartz is expecting a large crowd — at least 1,000 at tomorrow night’s opening — and he expects that all will come away with the message that “even if we don’t live in the Amazon, we all need to take care of our ecologies and communities.”
Abell has similar hopes for his viewers, but he found that some preservation will come down to a simpler cause.
“If the Amazon is going to be saved, it’s because of the birds,” Abell said jokingly. “People care about birds.”
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