Slumber Party, 2 © Mike Spinak
Sleeping Seal Lion © Mike Spinak
I am moved and inspired by sleeping sea lions.
Sea lions, when awake, can often seem like extraordinarily temperamental and unwarrantedly vicious animals toward their peers. They often attack each other for seemingly the slightest infractions; for example, I often see them chomp into each other's sides, leaving bloody wounds and permanent scars, apparently just to get one to scoot aside so that the other can more easily move past. Seemingly almost every encounter leads to a baring of fangs, barking and growling, snapping and striking; and they are covered with scars and open wounds, almost entirely caused by each other. Their bellicosity seems endless.
Except when they sleep. They all sleep together, and it's a magical phenomenon to behold. They sleep with anybody and everybody. They press into each other and make a solid carpet, so tight that no ground is visible between them. They pile on top of each other, sometimes 3 or 4 deep. They press their bodies together in the most intimate ways, face to face, face to crotch, face to belly, face to flipper – anything and everything. They let their bodies be the beds and pillows for each other. They do this regardless of age or sex or relation, including with strangers, and including with those whom they heatedly fought moments ago. They hold each other tenderly, caress each other, cuddle and snuggle and nuzzle each other as close as they can, seemingly relishing close contact without boundaries. They let go of their hostility, let go their grievances, and find peace and comfort, if just for a little while.
It inspires me and comforts me to see this. It gives me hope that kindness and tenderness toward each other always remains possible, that reconciliation can be achieved under even the most extreme circumstances, that the good still can always out.
Frankly, I have needed to see this reassuring message, through this last year.
Visually, I am intrigued by their constrained golden-brown-to white and blue-to-black color palette, and intrigued by their tonality, by their patterns, by their textures, by their lines. Also, the way light plays upon their fur often has an almost luminous quality. And their expressions often have a seemingly transcendental aspect to them. Also, scenes of their communal sleeping usually have no apparent visual cues about orientation (i.e., what is the top, bottom, left and right of the picture), which can have an other-worldly effect, in combination with their "luminousness" and their "transcendance".
They resonate with me; they are photogenic, to my eye.
They bring together some things I like to do, as a photographer.
I've always had a fascination with photographing people and wildlife while they sleep. I like they way they drop certain aspects and reveal other ones. People and animals show a different and beautiful side of themselves when they sleep.
I've tended toward a style as a wildlife photographer (and floral photographer, fungal photographer, etc.), where I often show them from very, very close, and where often I like to depict them with a portrait-like manner, as individuals, instead of as documentary examples of morphology and behavior. (Of course, I also do morphology and behavior shots.)
I tried to make many of them somewhat "dreamy" through light and tone. I tried to shoot many of these shots in a somewhat "tenebrist" style. Tenebrism, from the Italian word tenebroso, meaning "murky", is an offshoot of chiaroscuro. Instead or rendering light and dark in gradual tonal transitions to create a sense of space and form, as in chiaroscuro, tenebrism renders light and dark in contrast with each other, without much transition, often in order to express relative value. In the tenebrist style, darkness is often negative, metaphorically as well as literally the absence of light; and brightness is likewise where the light shines.
It can have an effect of luminous subjects emerging from shadowy void, and often is meant to suggest exalted status.
In this case, I use it to try to create (loosely speaking) a reverential sense about the intimacy the sea lions share when they sleep.
Also, another reason that I chose them for the project is that they have an appearance with a nice balance of familiar, yet foreign, helping to create an other-worldly, dreamy appearance.
Other related choices included showing them only while they are asleep; showing them extremely close up, with nothing visible but sea lion bodies, with very little sense of any other environmental context; and taking advantage of the visual qualities which naturally endow these creatures.
Thanks for looking.
I hope you enjoy.
