the .ignorance of mankind
I remember this like it was yesterday.
Not so much because it’s a fantastic picture, but ever so much more because of how sad it made me. It was late in the evening, I have this faint recollection that I came home from an evening at the camera club. Driving home on the freeway. Then I saw this badger lying on the side of the road. Hit by a car speeding by. It never had a chance. I pulled over with an idea forming in my head. A series of images about “roadkill”. Not the tasteless type of splattered shit (literally?) all over the place, but touching. Provoking a reaction. It was going to be “The Ignorance of Mankind”. That is really what it is.
Don’t get me wrong, I’m no saint. I’m like everyone else. Thank [insert deity of your choice here] I’ve never actually hit something “big”, I think the biggest being a bird, but I’ve hit a fair number of them. I don’t stop. I speed on, just like the rest of the world around me. Because that’s what we’re living in. An overspeeding world.
But not this night. This night it literally stopped me in my tracks.
I parked the car as far to the side of the freeway as I could, grabbed my gear and walked back. More than few cars speeding by honked at me. I set up the camera on the tripod, as low as I could. Eye height. So the world could see straight into those none-seeing eyes. Those eyes, which look at us, questioningly. Asking us “Why? What did I do to deserve this?”
It was a 44 second exposure, but I think I sat there for a full five minutes. The occasional car honking at me.
I cried. I cried for the badger. But I cried for myself as well, because I knew that tomorrow this moment would be gone and I would yet again be part of that ignorant mankind.
While I was packing up my gear a police car pulled up behind me. I reckon one or more of the passing drivers had called the police to notify there was a nutcase sitting on the side of the road and I got a stiff (well-deserved) warning for creating dangerous situations on a freeway (yeah, I didn’t really, but I shouldn’t have stopped). But I didn’t care.
Side note: while typing this post on one screen, I had the image open on the other screen. Zoomed in. I never before, in all those times I looked at this picture, noticed there’s a tiny drop of blood on the side of its muzzle. That touched me…
The first image had a much bigger emotional trigger in me than this one. Not that this one left me cold. It was almost like it was sleeping, with its paw under its head like that.
When I got out of the car (this was somewhere in the middle of nowhere in Finland), I knew that on the contrary of the vibrantly coloured first photo, this had to be in monochrome. But then when I downloaded it to the computer and made the edits that scene from the movie Ghost somehow got stuck in my head. Where at the death of the bad guy the shadows pulled out of the street and buildings and came to life. Not to indicate that this poor animal was bad at heart, but the way the shadow fell here made it look like its shadow was pulling away from it. And while I’m typically not a fan of partial colouring (or desaturation), I think in this image it works very well, with the harsh yellow line and the fading colour on the animal, depicting the life seeping away from its earthly shell.
And in the uncropped version of the image another Ignorant Man is racing by in his car.
Because these lives don’t seem to matter.
Every so often I look at these pictures and this feeling returns to me. I’ve gotten a lot older since I took this picture, and I would like to think I also got a lot more aware. I would like to think that I’ve moved away from being as ignorant as I used to be when I was younger. A man can keep on dreaming, can’t he?
The series Ignorance of Mankind never saw the light of day. Most likely because I felt hypocrite for accusing other people of being something I was myself as well.