Shristi Pandey
Whole and Part: An Exploration of Elephant Communication
The Senior Reflection Project was a set of markedly different experiences for me. I feel that this reflection is a perfect way to revisit some of those representative highlights of the overall journey. This writing is a piece of experiences put together in no particular order. To the reader who is not familiar with my project, I did a photography project where I combined photographs and micrographs to tell a story about elephant communication. The motivation behind the project was the desire to see the inner workings of an organism behavior. I took the photographs at the Chitwan National Park in Nepal and the Oakland zoo.
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Beep. Beep. Beep… Beep Beep Beep. My phone alarm went off at 4am in a cold and misty December morning at the Rhino Lodge in Chitwan National Park. I sat up straight and flicked the light switches to check if we had electricity. No. It was still load-shedding hours! (Also known as rolling blackouts, load-shedding refers to an intentional power outage where electricity delivery is stopped on a regular basis, but temporarily in response to a situation where there is less supply and more demand of electricity.) Reaching out to the windowsill, I grabbed my backup candle and lighter. I remembered yesterday’s harsh afternoon sunlight in the shed. I needed to hurry to catch the soft and golden early-morning light at the shed. I worked with the dim, flickering candlelight. In fifteen minutes, I was ready to roll.
I unplugged the battery charger and popped the battery into my camera. Did it get to full charge? Phew! Yes! I slipped on my jacket, wrapped a scarf around my neck and wore my long-strapped camera bag on one shoulder and my tripod on another. I am forgetting something… what am I forgetting? Oh yes, the notebook, my sketch pad. All set! I locked my room and left. Throughout the drive, I kept picturing, in my mind’s eye, the photograph that Frans had given to me on our first meeting: Twilight of the Giants.
When we finally reached there, I was thrilled by what I saw: there were ten magnificent male elephants tied with chains to thick stumps against a yellow, misty dawn. Beautiful compositions started racing my mind and I immediately took out my sketchpad and noted them down. The golden rim of morning sunlight touching their long white tusks let out a certain fluttering feeling in my heart. This was intermittently silenced by the occasional rumbles of one angry male, who was yanking at his chain. I was scared. There were a lot of mahouts around, but I was scared. As I knelt down in front of the bull to capture and amplify its magnificence, I was scared.
After 4 hours of what seemed like extensive photographing, I left for a cup of tea (when I started hearing my own rumbles). I settled into an outside chair of a nearby tea shop and pulled out my camera. While I sat there, sipping tea and munching on cereal bars, I flipped back and forth through the photos in my camera, somewhat judgmental, somewhat satisfied.
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“When you were little,” my mother sometimes recounts, “you were notoriously famous for breaking things open.” The remote controls, the toy piano, cordless phones, my brother’s toy tankers: she names the things I took apart one by one. “Nothing stood a chance!”
As a child, I must have been convinced that everything was made up of smaller units, and that if I broke them enough, they would eventually reveal themselves to me. I grew older and ‘sense’ kicked in but the curiosity for seeing what is inside and understanding how things work did not blur away. I carried forward the idea that breaking things apart and analyzing them is the very crux of science and exploration. My Senior Reflection project is the reenactment of the same process in an abstract sense. I sought to break down and understand elephant communication, a complex example of organism behavior in nature. I wanted to understand what it is that helps elephants communicate in fascinating ways, especially seismic communication in which elephants pick up seismic vibrations across very long distances through mechano-receptors in their feet or massive ossicles (bones) in their middle ears.
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I was nervous. It was the first time after going out in the field that I was blowing up the photos in a big computer screen. Out of experience, I knew that, often, the photos that looked great in that little camera LCD turned out disappointing in the computer screen: the sharp ones would turn out too blurry, balanced compositions looked awry, invisible distractions became visible. I went through the photos carefully, one by one. There were some delightful surprises but mostly disappointments. I knew I needed another chance.
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“Why elephants?” people often asked me during the final exhibition. The reason I chose elephants for the project goes back to the time when the little girl who was awed by the insides of remote controls, cordless phones, or hand-watches started being perplexed by the same ideas of breaking complex things in nature. When I was about fifteen years old, my family who lived in the beautiful Himalayan country of Nepal without seeing much of it, decided to go on a vacation. We settled on Chitwan National park, a place that I had heard much about from friends who had been there and spotted a tiger walking through the jungle, deer grazing in open grassy fields, a peacock spreading its feathers against a light, drizzling rain, or a rhino peacefully bathing in the murky waters in the middle of a thicket. I was excited to see and feel that for myself, things that I had only seen sitting in the living room, watching the National Geographic or the kind of awe that I had only felt vicariously.
“Baby Elephants!” said my mother, referring to the elephant breeding center in the park, a place that was famous for having elephant calves. When we eventually got there, I remember standing, hands pressed against the wooden railing behind which a mother elephant was chained with her baby sleeping right next to her. There, right in front of me, was a huge and beautiful mother elephant. I lifted my head and looked at her and marveled at the sheer enormity of the amazing animal and felt humbled by her beauty and magnificence.
Gazing at the animal whose grandeur I was still devouring, I remember thinking about the wonderfully complex and intertwined insides of the animal. The time when I looked up to the marvelous mother elephant, taken by the beauty of the animal reflects how I often feel when I am close to nature. The very inspiration I feel in moments like these have, in part, driven me to become a biology major, a field of study that I think allows me to appreciate complexity in nature as it is but at the same time gives me the opportunity to understand them by methodically classifying them or taking them apart or modeling them. My Senior Reflection project let me use photography as a way to capture and be awed by complexity of these animals and at the same time delve into the process of revelation in which I try to break down and understand them. It gave me the unique opportunity to merge the two sides of my personality together: one that stands in awe for appreciation of nature and the other that seeks to understand complexity.
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“I plan to take light, fluorescent and if possible electron micrographs of elephant tissues for my project,” I was at the Stanford Research Animal Facility, talking to Dr. Donna Bouley about the possibility of taking elephant tissue images. “First off, elephant tissue slides are extremely difficult to make,” Dr. Bouley said. I had never used anything other than a light microscope and knew nothing about how tissues slides were made. “And, it is virtually impossible to fluorescently stain them.” I was taken aback.
“I understand. I am willing to work with what you have,” I explained. Dr. Bouley handed me a few slides, showed me around and left me with a Leica light microscope. I put the slides on the stage one by one, navigating through the tissue under different magnifications. Seeing tissues in an artistic light was an experience quite different from seeing them with a scientific eye. Because I was in an artistic and creative mindset, I saw smoke trails in connective tissues, steep ravines and river banks in bone tissues, whirlwinds in Pacinian corpuscles. Dr. Bouley and I share a few words, commenting on the beauty of the structures that hid in these tiny slides. I could go for hours exploring a box of slides and seeing these unique shapes and structures.
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On my second visit to the Oakland zoo, I had arranged to go behind the scenes of the elephant display section. I walked behind the fences with a keeper and soon I was inside an enclosure, a couple of feet next to a giant African male, thick metal bars between us. “Please stay behind the yellow line,” I was instructed. I was given the chance to photograph a giant male, Ash, as the keepers were bathing him. Ash was being sprayed with a large water hose. The lighting was soft and the mud in his body was being rinsed out. His dark brown skin was clean and shiny. That was it. I moved to the side, and popped out the telephoto lens. I excitedly changed lenses and hurriedly moved in. The upshot, to my pleasant surprise, was the photo that took the central place in the final collection!
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Workshops were one of the most vital parts of the Senior Reflection although they seem less eventful in comparison with the traveling and photographing associated with my project. I remember one particular workshop session very distinctly. In the middle of winter quarter, I was struggling with putting elephant photographs together with completely different set of microscopic images. The photographs were different from the micrographs in every respect: color, composition, texture, and point of view. I was trying really hard to make pairings or triptychs and was being increasingly let down by its failure. On that particular Thursday, Sue made a comment that will stay with me long after the project. “It doesn’t have to be a particular way,” said Sue “think of the assumptions that you are making here, Shristi.”
There isn’t a certain way things need to be done in a creative process or a particular rule that needs to be followed. If anything, rules are broken. I had not quite internalized this back then. Creative thinking, I will admit, did not come easy to me. Coming from a culture that valued rules and staying within boundaries, it took a fair bit of un-learning to shatter these assumptions I was making throughout the class. Unconventional thinking is an asset not just in the arts but also in the sciences. I am absolutely certain that I will be carrying forward these learnings and unlearnings as I move forward in a career of research, a process that will demand quite a bit of creativity and unconventionality in thinking.
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“Dive in. Step back. Dive in. Step Back.” – Twyla Tharp.
Creative projects are a struggle. This project was no different. The struggle became especially visible when I was working on the arrangements of the photographs and micrographs to create a coherent piece. The micrographs and photographs were so different that they seemed like parts of a different story. I wavered between different options. Should I create two different pieces: one for the photos and the other for tissue images? Or should I leave out the micrographs altogether? The decision to leave out the micrographs would make my work easier, for sure. By removing the micrographs, I would not have to think about meshing the pinkish colors of tissue stains with the dark browns of the elephant silhouettes or the coarse texture of its skin with smooth texture of its tissue? But, I would lose the very idea I started with. Projects transform, but this transformation came with too high of a cost. I knew that the micrographs were a part of my initial vision and that they needed to be in there. This interpretation forced me to create the arrangement that accompanies this essay. My interpretation of the final product is this: I read the piece from left to right. As I progress from left to right, I find myself delving into abstractions and inner workings of the beautiful animal. The middle eye, for me, signifies the viewer’s eye, or the curious child’s eye, or the aspiring scientist’s eye, who longs to see the insides.
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This project was a series of revelations for me, both as a photographer and as an aspiring scientist. When I was out in the field, behind my camera and constantly on my toes, I felt a sense of heightened awareness and perceived what was in front of me in somewhat surprising ways. Spending hours in front of the computer (trying to sketch out a good arrangement) only to come up with a dull arrangement was disappointing but also made me accept failure and go beyond it. Recognizing the assumptions I was making during the creative process and trying to break free from them added to my self-awareness. Moving from a stage where I was scrounging in the dark to a stage with some clarity was, in hindsight, a pretty remarkable journey!