Lithograph

Ink on map paper

Ink on map paper

The Best Years of Our Lives, on Facebook
Tamarind King once decided to draw her entire Facebook feed on a paper towel roll. She mused: “Most of us don’t really read our Facebook feed–we just skim it for the parts that catch our eye. This project made me have to read every single word, and it’s amazing how much detail I’ve missed when just skimming casually.”

by Katherine Chen

by Katherine Chen

Arts Intensive programs allow Stanford students of all academic backgrounds to explore their creative sides during the two and a half weeks before the start of Autumn Quarter. The eight programs comprising Arts Intensive 2011 spanned many artistic disciplines. One was “Conservation Photography,” taught by Professor Susan McConnell and Neil Ever Osborne.

Some of the Artists

Katherine Chen
Major: Computer Science, Year: Senior
Katherine is interested in UX design, health, and mobile technologies. She defines herself as both a designer and a developer, and hopes to one day work in an environment in which design and technology work together seamlessly to better reflect how they occur in our culture.

Christine Khademi
Major: Biological Sciences, Year: Senior
Christine studies neurobiology.  Her artistic interest in photography, stems from her enjoyment from viewing the world with a keen observer’s eye and a love of science and nature. She hopes to attend graduate, medical, or business school after graduation and to start her own nonprofit.

Wending Lu
Major: Electrical Engineering, Year: Sophomore
Wending is interested in sustainability, technology, and design. He hopes to produce technology to mitigate human impact on the environment. Recently, he has “become obsessed” with the photography. He likes to play around with studio/strobe work as well as take pictures of nature and landscapes.

by Christine Khademi

Katherine’s Thoughts

For the first week, I recited that Joel Sartore quote to anyone who asked me what conservation photography was to hide the fact that I didn’t know. Here I was, a CS major with no demonstrated interest in the natural world nor any photographic experience, enrolled in a 2-week arts intensive course specifically on the topic.

The class moved fast. Photography basics were covered in 3 lectures: POV, composition, and light. After that, we let ourselves be inspired by the experts, stunning award-winning work by world-famous photographers and our professors. We watched Frans Lanting’s visual depiction of the earth from the beginning of time. We marveled over Paul Nicklen’s close encounter with a leopard seal beneath the slowly melting Arctic ice. We read about how Carlton Ward, Jr. showed Africa that Gabon was more than just oil wells and raw materials, how Ansel Adams galvanized the American government to set up a national parks system, and how Peter Domobrovskis halted a proposed dam construction that would have destroyed the Tasmanian ecosystem.

Every 6:30am, we wiped the sleep from our eyes to photograph in the morning golden light. We made night trips to the observatory to capture the moon and the hills after dark, sat in silence as our cameras recorded the stars. Our expeditions spanned the Bay Area: Marin Headlands, Moss Landing, Monterey, Hopkins Marine Station, and Half Moon Bay. The heavy tug of the camera strap became comfortable, and switching between different lenses became routine. Each day we’d take a few more shots, wait a few more half-hours, climb a little higher, stay for the sunset. See the world through a lens, position what was before us in a frame. We were always ready.

And suddenly this hodgepodge of images started to mean something. For every 100, there was one shot good enough to set aside for some greater purpose. In pairs, we each tackled a theme in nature and explored it through a series of 10-16 images. My partner’s and my photo essay explored vulnerability in the natural world: in life and death, in beauty, destruction, and man’s impact on nature. When shooting, we originally searched for portrayals of strength and fragility but found later that the concept were trying to illuminate was more subtle. Because big things can break and small things have strength. As humans, we have the power to protect, and I believe that this is the essence of conservation photography.

What does it mean to me now? It’s beauty and urgency wrapped into a frame that happens on purpose. It’s a decisive moment and a call to action, touching hearts and changing minds, making a statement that is not easily ignored. It’s showing people the wonders of this world and what they stand to lose. The images of a conservation photographer are images the decision makers of this world need to see.

You close the shutter. And that’s when the real work begins.

by Katherine Chen

by Wending Lu

by Katherine Chen

you, dear,
just might have the face
of a thousand summers:
scratches of sun
caked into flakey irises,
golden as filo, yes,
but stiff
overheating

because you never
cannonballed, knees cupped
into a weightless pool
never wrapped the moon’s gauze
round sweet broken bone

no, you sat
caged in tupperware
like a dried up dumpling
life’s oil
all sucked out

I.
Marching in the snow, tire marks
breaking ice shales, this is Siberia in lucid sleep,
in the gallop of steam & horns.

II.
I must be a mammoth once wedded to ice,
I am as old as the whipping storms.
There is no Venus in the morning sky, pines
growing wet with mercury—
when the whiteness leaves, another comes
with the promise of a crow.

III.
I feel a bulldozer in the distance, a simian groaning
with mouthfuls of salt;
I taste the earth behind it, I lick the wounds.

IV.
Over the slumping of ice grains on sand, a tusk of magnolia
juts from the sun,
abandons her tracks on the cobbled waves.
The water swallows her.
She is not hungry, but she lives
& primal, her lips try hunger.

V.
I send emptiness to that other coast—
a floating rubber pail.
I give what lives to the basin edge: silence & its waterbed.

By this hostel for the fins—infantry of the feathered flock,
I dig a nest for the flipper breed.
When I tire & the tides grow limbs,
I will gestate beneath the fog, in the infinite rinds
of this winter, this gathering in the womb.