Â鶹Éç

Available for over a year

Good morning and welcome to the beginning of another long week in politics - in which we shall be pulled between a morbid fascination with human struggle, failure and folly and the need to turn away and find something to distract us. Shall I watch the news (I ask myself)… or go for a walk with my camera? Seeking something between the narrative of despair and the narrative of distraction, my attention has been caught this week by the story of Noah’s Ark. In the hands of wildlife photographer Joel Sartore, the biblical account of the animals brought two by two into the ark has become the inspiration for a national geographic project to photograph all 9800 species held in the world’s zoos. As an amateur bird photographer I am in awe of Sartore’s arresting artworks in which extraordinary creatures great and small – from the celebrated white rhino to the little known fennec fox – are startlingly presented on black or white backgrounds. Like portraits, these endangered subjects gaze out at us through the camera’s lens, inviting a response. The point for Sartore is not to comfort us with the beauty of what Darwin called the ‘endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful’ whilst the world goes to hell in a handcart. Rather, Sartore’s hope is that by drawing our gaze to make eye contact with these creatures, his portraits (9000 to date) will inspire us to care about them and work to preserve their future and our own. He wants us to make changes in our homes, in our gardens and in our communities. Our zoos, he argues, should be our arks, places of conservation and research that can bring hope not just to individual species, but to life on earth, itself. Noah’s Ark is a difficult story. It’s easy to get distracted by quests to find the real mountain on which it rested or by attempts to disprove it ever existed. Though often marketed to children for its animals and its rainbow, it’s also difficult because it is a story of God’s exasperation with the human race – so disgusted is God, he decides to begin the creation again. On the other hand it’s also a story of collaboration to preserve the ecological diversity on which life itself depends. A collaboration between God - the source of life - and the one family who will give up the rat race and listen.   Looking forward to another week of deliberating, wrangling and posturing I have a certain sympathy with the God of this story, fed up with human short sightedness and self-centredness. But Sartore’s work reminds me that the invitation here is not to watch from a distance and wisely shake my head, but to allow myself to see, and, making eye contact with my fellow creatures, be moved to act – in my own spheres of influence - in ways that make for life.