The Enormous Birds, or the Tiny People

I don’t include humans in my artwork very much. When I am constantly surrounded by humans, they who have claimed every surface and every corner of our wide, wide Earth, I look for the pockets of space. Space like a pause. These pauses help me see beyond the trifling concerns of life as a human, guiding me towards the bigger forces swirling around us. Crowds have always overwhelmed me anyway.

When people do make their way into the frame, they’re… tiny. Small people amidst wide open fields, peeking over hills, dwarfed by trees, like small dots next to boulders: their role is to elucidate the majesty of the natural world. They are barely tiny marks on the page. I first noticed this trend in my photography probably ten years ago. I used to call the people I captured in my photos “ant people”, given their diminutive and scattered presence across broad spaces.

Sometimes I imagine switching places with the other denizens of Earth. What if I was the size of a sparrow? And pigeons were as plentiful and full of swagger as the humans? Would the bigger-than-us gulls and geese, with population counts of billions, blot out the sky with their wings until we could no longer see the sun? Would we be jostled across the grains of sand as they carelessly went about their lives? Or would they still skirt us warily, leaving us to our strange ways?

Even in my imagination, I can’t untangle the scene from human presence. Even if I try to take the people out of a space, or a place, the trace persists. This wide open beach has this particular shape because the humans shovel the sand from nearby roads back towards the sea. Its surface is pitted with mesmerizing patterns because of the millions of feet that have trod upon it. The tides and the winds will leave their own mark but they don’t erase our footprints. I’m not sure if these scenes appeal to me precisely because of the marks people left behind, or because this is where I can relax in nature’s grandeur despite human interference.