Eco-Haptic Photography: Visualizing Irish Bogland in Rachel Giese's The Donegal Pictures

Abstract

This article examines how the landscape photography of bogs in Rachel Giese's The Donegal Pictures addresses the pressing concerns occluded by ubiquitous tourist photography, lending itself to an analysis of contemporary visual culture and bogs. This article also argues that Giese's photographs of the Irish landscape can be viewed as part of visual culture using what Laura Marks has coined in The Skin of the Film (2000) as haptic visuality—seeing as tactile—as an alternative strategy of photography in order to revision bogs as a sensory experience. Through this tactile quasiexperience the viewer develops a deeper relationship with the landscape and the photograph, thereby bridging the separation between viewer and object in what media scholars have called “embodied spectatorship.” Once these two traditionally opposed points of view gain an aligned embodiment, a sustained connection with the object (in this case the bog landscape) can enhance the empathy and responsibility of the viewer toward this enigmatic ecosystem. This article dispels previous notions of Irish landscape photography while also focusing on a specific region in Ireland by conflating the present environmental sensitivity of bogs with a focused consciousness around photographic representation.