Wapiti, Metro Toronto Zoo Possibly 1984 - 1985

Volker Seding made this photograph, Wapiti, Metro Toronto Zoo, date unknown. The light in this image feels flat, and a little sad. It's a scene that is both natural and unnatural – a deer standing in a wooded area, yes, but also a chain link fence and a picnic table. The colour palette is drab and muted. The surface of the print is smooth, and you can almost feel the slight sheen of the photograph, it's cool to the touch. The bare branches of the trees reach upward, creating a kind of visual echo of the deer’s antlers. The photograph has captured a quiet moment of reflection and perhaps a touch of melancholy. I am reminded of Robert Adams, another photographer who documented the ways in which the natural world is altered by human presence, but Seding lacks Adam's finesse. Instead, there's something very matter-of-fact here. Art, like life, is an ongoing conversation, full of echoes and whispers, where meaning is never quite fixed.