even*cleveland: the whale hunt

the whale hunt

The Whale Hunt by Jonathan Harris:

In May 2007, Harris spent nine days following an Inupiat whale hunt. He went to document, not to tell a tale or mount a platform. His process involved establishing a 'photographic heartbeat' by taking images every five minutes, even using a timer as he slept. The 'heartbeat' was variable, accelerating in times of stress and resulting in more pictures of those moments. The resulting 3,000+ images are gathered on the project site.

Harris' statement is fascinating reading, and the site is brilliant. His C.V. says that he 'designs systems to explore and explain the human world' but the genius thing about the project is that it is not an explanation. The site interface allows you to flip and filter through the images in a myriad of ways, constructing your own narrative. It's irresistible and dangerous. Given my own bloody-mindedness, my first goal was to find images of the kill. The tenor of the project left me uneasy with the impulse of reducing a cascade of moments to a single point.

I'm interested in that tension between messy comprehensiveness and the incisive word or image. That sort of editing is necessary to give ourselves some reassurance of our own understanding - to take the barrage of data swirling around us and find the handles, the crystalline points, the small piece that lets us think we understand the whole. But what gets left out? What do our choices say - these images we feel encapsulate so much? How much is miscommunicated in these acts of editing?

Images from top to bottom:
May 6, 11:35 PM: Smeared blood from dragging muktuk across the ice.
May 7, 12:40 AM: Whaling knives.
May 7, 1:40 AM: Joe Ahkivgaq's whale harvest.

All photos by Jonathan Harris.

What sort of diary should I like mine to be? Something loose-knit and yet not slovenly, so elastic that it will embrace anything, solemn, slight or beautiful, that comes into my mind. I should like it to resemble some deep old desk or capacious hold-all, in which one flings a mass of odds and ends without looking them through. I should like to come back, after a year or two, and find that the collection had sorted itself and refined itself and coalesced, as such deposits so mysteriously do, into a mould, transparent enough to reflect the light of our life, and yet steady, tranquil compounds with the aloofness of a work of art. The main requisite, I think, on reading my old volumes, is not to play the part of a censor, but to write as the mood comes or of anything whatever; since I was curious to find how I went for things put in haphazard, and found the significance to lie where I never saw it at the time.

V. Woolf

Don't be amazed if you see my eyes always wandering. In fact, this is my way of reading, and it is only in this way that reading proves fruitful for me. If a book truly interests me, I cannot follow it for more than a few lines before my mind, having seized on a thought that the text suggests to it, or a feeling, or a question, or an image, goes off on a tangent and springs from thought to thought, from image to image, in an itinerary of reasonings and fantasies that I feel the need to pursue to the end, moving away from the book until I have lost sight of it. The stimulus of reading is indispensable to me, and of meaty reading, even if, of every book, I manage to read no more than a few pages. But those few pages already enclose for me whole universes, which I can never exhaust.

Italo Calvino

Why didn't she try collecting something? It didn't matter what. She would find it gave an interest to life, and there was no end to the little curiosities one could easily pick up.

Henry James

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