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Expecting plastic : Albatrosses and the discovery of 'culture'
Quigley, Killian
Quigley, Killian
Author
Abstract
Filmic, photographic, and poetic images of seabirds encumbered, weakened, and killed by anthropogenic plastic have gone viral. This essay asks what visual, generic, and affective modes such images invoke and invite. It postulates, first, that they give rise to, and work through, discernible conventions. It contends, second, that these images and their spectators tend to communicate via a kind of feedback loop, whereby human lookers-on recognise themselves, their societies, and their cultures in the contents of bird bellies. The essay suggests, furthermore, that this loop is a key element of these images’ power, but ironically compromises their capacity for testifying to the complex ecological, historical, and imperial contexts that subtend the scenes they display. By constantly rediscovering the signs of their own culture in the stomachs of dead birds, spectacles and spectators hazard reproducing a fixation that distracts from the broader situatedness of these encounters.
Keywords
plastic, photography, albatross, Chris Jordan, midway, horror
Date
2019
Type
Journal article
Journal
Green Letters: Studies in Ecocriticism
Book
Volume
23
Issue
4
Page Range
394-405
Article Number
ACU Department
Institute for Humanities and Social Sciences
Faculty of Education and Arts
Faculty of Education and Arts
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Relation URI
Source URL
Event URL
Open Access Status
License
All rights reserved
File Access
Controlled