Iconic Catastrophe and the Question of Nature

Abstract

This essay deals with video footage depicting sudden onset natural disasters caught in the event. The attempt is to critically revisit the concept of nature that these images evoke, a concept that today is often bracketed due to its transcendental bearings (e.g. in Timothy Morton’s influential deconstruction of ecocriticism in Ecology Without Nature). Considering video to be part of the extended family of photographic veridiction techniques, this analysis suggests that the journalistic value of amateur disaster footage rests on an iconic realism that can trace its origins back to the romantic notion of nature expressing itself in the photograph. This idea is in turn part of a larger epistemic order that celebrates the Book of Nature as universal reason: a keystone concept from the scientific revolutions of the 16th and 17th century. Understanding disaster video footage in the light of this framework means neither to support positivism nor to endorse constructivism; it means instead to assume a third position where photo-media embraces a particular modality of seeing, a way of making things visible with its own premises and potentialities. From this perspective nature no longer presents itself in the image. But with video-recorded natural catastrophes a glitch in the photographic mode of seeing presents us with an irrecusable remains of what used to be known as nature. This glitch, this iconic disjunction provoked by the depicted scene, concerns the proportional rendering of relative size, conventionally coded and secured by the camera’s perspective construction. The iconic disruption of photographic image relations provoked by the depicted chaos is in this paper offered as an alternative to the traditional sublime. For the ghost of nature is no longer conjured up by some sensuous overload but rather with the visible discordance between the image’s representing and presenting capacities.