Abstract
Despite movement in cultural and legal spaces to reconceptualize nature from object to subject, scholarly thinking about photography has not thus far taken up the idea of nature as subject within the genre of portraiture. Instead, pictorial categories now conceived of as traditional and even naturalized relegate works that focus on combined elements of the natural world most often into the category of landscape. In the face of climate change and mass extinction, a key question of the contemporary era that has risen across nations and cultural contexts is of the possibility of rights for non-human entities. Previously I have addressed how the photographic portrait draws humans inside or outside the boundaries of being worthy of rights. This paper addresses a recently written section of the project, examining the question of why non-human beings have not been deemed appropriate subjects of the portrait.
Presenters
Ann Pegelow KaplanAssociate Professor, Department of Interdisciplinary Studies, Appalachian State University, North Carolina, United States
Details
Presentation Type
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session
Theme
KEYWORDS
Photograph, Human Rights, Humanism, Post-Humanism, Rights of Nature, Portrait, Landscape
