The beluga hung there. In a net, in the night, in what may be called the most dramatic scene of this summer whale opera. The amorphous white body, which according to experts had lost weight during the stay in the French Seine, but still weighed about 800 kilos, was reminiscent of a marble statue of the Virgin or an Egyptian mummy (and unfortunately also of Elon Musk’s tofu-colored torso). , who popped up on holiday snaps from Greece a few weeks ago – don’t think about it, don’t think about it).
The lighting was sublime, you didn’t have to tell the photographers that were there. They captured the whole ‘unparalleled’ and moving rescue operation with fervor. For whom? For us, of course, the audience that sympathized from the moment the animal was discovered about a week and a half ago in a lock near Paris and was monitored by drones. The star itself, the white whale that had lost its way, died shortly after the apotheosis in a refrigerated truck on its way to Normandy. A hastily administered vitamin shot was to no avail. Standing ovation, crying.
There is fire everywhere and too little water
Anyone who occasionally only looks at the world through news photos might just come to the conclusion this summer (just like the previous one) that humanity and the earth that we have appropriated is over. Scroll through the offer of the news agencies and doom and gloom are your part. There is fire everywhere – forest and roadside fires, explosions, burnt oil depots and grain fields – and too little water. Rivers dry up, glaciers disappear, lakes evaporate and reveal their deepest secrets in the form of mafia long-dumped. The images are endless and they seem to reinforce each other; one fatalistic photo immediately mobilizes ten others, even more miserable, even more disastrous.
If you look through those black glasses, the tragic photo novel of the lost beluga is yet another omen of a grim future. That’s kinda weird. Because more than two years ago I wrote an enthusiastic piece here about the countless photos of animals that seized the coronalockdowns to view the extinct urban environment. World beast playtime had arrived, with dolphins in Venice (turned out not real) and a family of Egyptian geese, ready for take offat the abandoned airport Ben-Gurion (really).
I was wearing different glasses then, one of rainbow unicorn. We had to sit inside because of that horrible virus, but on the other hand we polluted less, less CO2 emitted, less… were actually ourselves – and thus the world would heal. haha. That also turned out not to be real and when we crawled out of the last quarantine, a terrible war broke out. Since then, the world has been in turmoil, beaked whales swam near Zandvoort and a polar bear made an appearance for the first time in history in southern Canada, far from its natural territory. Within that new context, I think: we’re all going to die.
Something we can draw hope from
I would like to make a case for a different kind of photo press agency: the photo press agency of simultaneity (or something like that, I’m open to suggestions). Like no other medium, photography is able to show the simultaneity of events. Look, something terrible is happening here and it definitely needs to be portrayed, but a little further on, at the very same time, something completely different is happening, something we can draw hope from. And we need to see that too.
For every image of a forest fire, an image of someone planting trees. An example of regenerative agriculture for every bone-dry field. For every lost white whale, a specimen that can read traffic signs. That would at least offer some perspective, because this is really not doable.