​​Scenes on the Death of Nature

As a woman lays her head in the lap of another, the viewer is reminded of one simple fact: it is our nature to love. Anne Ferran’s ​series ​Scenes on the Death of Nature​ 1986​ portray​s​ a yearning for naturalistic contact with each other that has long been lost; Ferran’s daughter and friends posing in ornate, tableau-like scenes that reject identity just enough to make room for speculation.

Within Scenes on the Death of Nature IV​ 1986,​ ​there ​lies a pensive beauty, the melancholy expression of the slumberous woman serving as a love letter to a past feeling of relatedness as the photograph dissipates the line between our natural realities and the manufactured. Despite this fracturing, Scenes on the Death of Nature IV portrays the notion of connection as an intangible yet lost expression of our humanness. A connection that remains as a thin residue, like when we place our head on the lap of someone we love.

In the portrayal of this vulnerable moment, Ferran brings the audience outside of the frame. She invites us to consider a notion that says I know what it is like to love, to exist in a state of vulnerability, it is of our very nature. She brings the audience on a tender journey into the lives of two women and begs the question, does their closeness with each other reveal a remoteness with nature or does it express our nature with each other?

Scenes on the Death of Nature IV illustrates a uniquely feminist perspective. The highly posed, albeit candid scene presents an inherently paradoxical existence. It projects a poster of traditional femininity, which is challenged through the idea of death implied by the title. It is as if the artwork is begging viewers to consider the notion of performance through womanhood — as even in sleep, or death, women are objects of observation, posed even in our most intimate moments as devices of a female facade. It is in the context of this perspective that the viewer is asked to reflect on the presence of 'nature', the portraits revealing nature as an indefinite relationship that we have with ourselves and with each other.

Further, one can consider the passive language of the women’s bodies in Scenes on the Death of Nature as paramount to Ferran’s intention. Their distant expressions are more like portraits of myth rather than authentic people, suggesting that traditional binaries of the ‘feminine’ are myths themselves and are — contrary to historical considerations — not an inherent part of women's identities. When we look closer at the highly poised, classical costuming of the women, the previously natural, flowing clothes and textures hold more imperfections than are noticeable at first glance. Laborious and artificial, the clothes — frayed and damaged with poorly sewn seams — reflect the conventions of traditional femininity as a manufactured establishment rather than a natural consequence of the female zeitgeist.

Scenes on the Death of Nature exists transiently, it is open for us to afford our own identities as individual women upon it. The work is not a fixed moment, or fixed narrative in history. As the intimacy of the portrait suggests, human connection is a narrative that exists within us all. Through theatrically ambiguous compositions the series is able to traverse time; it is just enigmatic enough to allow space for rumination 38 years after its creation. Scenes on the Death of Nature asks for the audience to contemplate their own nature as individuals, as the women wait for the viewer’s gaze to impart upon them an identity that exists in this contemporary moment.

This story is part of the 2024 Young Writers Digital Residency.