Imagines Memoriae
Jennifer Nelson: Nature Photography & Digital Art
I am a photographer, a teacher, a traveler; a wife, a daughter, a sister, an aunt, a friend; a cat woman, a gardener, a dreamer, a melancholic. This last identity is newly born: I have seen the Greenland glaciers melting and read the planet's tea leaves in global warming's cup. Life on Earth is changing, because the planet is changing, and that is the nature of life.
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Imagines Memoriae. Memorial Photos. This digital portfolio revives the traditions of momento mori and ars moriendi, the remembrance of mortality and the art of dying. The natural beauty I capture in my images can only fade from reality as the animals and plants and places they feature crumble into dust. What you see here has already blown away. Mourn not.
Reverēre!
Salt crystals rise from the alkali lake bottom that is the floor of Death Valley, U.S., below sea level.
Coastal roads flood daily at high tide along the mid-Atlantic region of the United States.
Sunset over Canada's Nunavit Territory, near Hudson's Bay, July 2015: a water-logged land of streams and rivers, ponds and lakes.
"Why Latin?" you wonder. "Latin is a dead language," I explain, "and I like irony. And puns." Thus, a dead language names the images of a dying planet. To call a language "dead" is to say it no longer evolves with use, yet Latin for centuries has served the intellectual imperialism of dissecting and categorizing the things—inanimate, animate, who cares?—of this world. Latin's various grammatical forms shape words for their context. I show you by the noun forms of the navigation menu that my natural subjects stand apart, in their own rights to existence, and not as direct or indirect objects of human use and abuse. Finally, Latin's liturgical presence gives it magical resonance, and I seek its compelling power to change hearts and enlighten minds.
Semper natura conciliat. Hominum non domare potest natura.
Natura nihil frustra facit. Ut vivere discamus natura.