Meet the Artist: Joann Brennan

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Joann Brennan's photographs grapple with the question of how we sustain wildness in a human world. Her work recognizes the paradoxical nature of human efforts to control and conserve wildlife. In her Managing Eden series, Brennan captures stewardship efforts across the country, showing the intimate relationship between scientists and their specimens. Her images were featured in the exhibition The Singing and the Silence: Birds in Contemporary Art.

JOANN BRENNAN: For over the past 20 years I've been working on a photographic project titled “Managing Eden.” The project started when I became curious about nature, wildness in landscapes around Massachusetts where I was going to school. In fact, Barbara Bosworth, who is a photographer represented in this exhibition, was my professor at the time.

Barbara invited me to join her photographing in the Northeast. She had an idea to go and photograph hunting, and I joined her. For a year or two we photographed hunting together. We each made different kinds of photographs, but it helped me understand what kind of rigor I should be applying to my creative process. I learned a lot from working with Barbara.

Over time, I began to broaden the scope from hunting to wildlife conservation, looking at specimens in museum collections. The project was really all about trying to understand - what is our relationship to nature? There is always a reference to humanness, human beings,

how we're trying to manage wildlife populations.

At first, when I started photographing a long time ago, I had this idea that nature was lost. That in the future, because of our intense impact on the environment that someday we might not have wildness in our backyards or wild places in the world. As I photographed and met people, I realized that there are amazing experts out there working really hard to try to find this balance between human concerns and wild populations.

Twenty years later in the project I'm hopeful, because I do think the best and brightest minds are working to figure out how we're going to do this, how we're going to live in harmony with nature. It's interesting, because I think living in harmony with nature actually means an amazing amount of artificial management. Artificial in the fact that we do all kinds of things to try to manage wildlife populations, to manipulate habitat for the well-being of wild animals, and I do believe that that's actually critical. I think if we weren't managing nature the way that we are we would absolutely lose it.

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Meet the Artist: Joann Brennan

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