Balamohan Shingade

Taught by Beauty

Mythily Meher

When walking in forests, I often take a photo to try to see better. The forest’s loveliness is engulfing but the camera lets me parse this into smaller parts. I take it out. I frame and shoot the dappled bark here, the slim ribs of light piercing past branches there. I put the camera away and let myself be awed. I take many photos that I always end up deleting. Awful photos—all the textures, the richness, of the forest’s flesh come out flat. I take them anyway, knowing they are no good. It is not for a record, but for the moment—an act of engaging the privilege of being there.

With her lush bush images, Chervelle Athena achieves something remarkable: she elicits the blissy, moody, misty quality of being there though you, the viewer, are not. Athena seems attuned to qualities of the trees, ferns, and mosses that I sense, but that my own gaze cannot articulate. Where I see a gorgeous mass of leafy subjects, she seems to discern—despite their mysteries—vitalities and eloquence, as if she is sensitive at some level to their way of life. This intuitive attunement, I think, along with technical skill, lets her depict defined beings. To me, her photos are beautiful like the forests are beautiful.

Elaine Scarry has written about the cognitive experience of witnessing beauty and how, in such instances, “our self-absorption falls away”.¹ Beauty, Scarry observes, delivers the beholder at once into two rarely co-existing states: a state of bliss and a sense of being side-lined. Scarry believes that this pleasure and humility at-once is the quality we must inhabit to pursue collective good, and beholding beauty teaches us this.

To witness this beauty through Athena’s images, as if there, seems especially poignant in a time like this, when our absence from the bush can be an act of care. For the past half-century at least, an epidemic of dieback disease has been killing kauri in Northland, Coromandel and Great Barrier Island forests. Dieback is spread by a minuscule species of water mould whose spores live in soil. The spores move with that soil, often on mammalian bodies, biding long periods of wait-time (up to six years on a pair of shoes)² and travelling large distances to infect new tree communities. Sick trees may not show symptoms for years; almost all sick trees die. This way, a species whose whakapapa can be traced to the Jurassic period may, in some time, be facing extinction. It is a fate that Te Kawerau ā Maki iwi sought to stymie when they placed a rāhui on the Waitākere ranges, prohibiting human bodies from entering.

We are, now, all quite acquainted with distancing as a form of collective care. This too teaches humility. Perhaps the need, for some of us, to have to learn such humility is a symptom of deeply rooted (and deeply dangerous) imperial conviction in a right to be everywhere it is possible to be, and to possess.

Reading Athena’s research and artist statements, it is clear that the whenua’s fate weighs heavy in her thinking and her work. As a Pākeha here, she puts herself in service of futures in which the whenua flourishes, full of species, and this informs these photographs’ gently ethical force.

In the soft cool of curator Balamohan Shingade’s booth, Athena’s images hang on the wall. They also surround the booth, filtering through the thin wooden bars. The space is still, yet sensuous, appealing to my bodily catalogue of air textures and sonic tones that accompany such scenes. I trust this communion between photographer, curator, forest. My imagination stirs, climbs to its feet, and stretches towards what I cannot know.




¹ Scarry, Elaine. 2014. Beauty and the Pact of Aliveness. Blashfield Address. American Academy of Arts and Letters, May 21 (https://artsandletters.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/06/2014_Blashfield.pdf).

² Department of Conservation. 2018. How can I help save Kauri…while out hunting?, Keep Kauri Standing / Kia Toitu He Kauri, October (https://www.kauridieback.co.nz/media/1824/2018-kd-hunters-fs-portrait-v2.pdf).




MYTHILY MEHER is an anthropologist, writer and educator. Her work draws on critical medical ethnography, decolonising knowledge perspectives, history and affect to study, theorise and work towards justice. She currently lives in Tāmaki Makaurau where she is a Research Fellow at The University of Auckland.