The development of new technology regularly leads to new forms of art. The invention of metal paint tubes in the 19th century, for example, helped artists to carry their paints into the field, fueling the explosion of plein air painting and Impressionism. The invention of the electric guitar spawned rock ‘n roll.

But sometimes the technology takes over, funneling art into narrower and narrower directions.

That’s exactly what has happened in the last 30 years in nature photography.

Time was — and I mean a time when photographers shot on slow speed slide film and used manual focus lenses — it was just plain tough to get a picture of a bird in flight. It’s not easy today but it’s a whale of a lot easier than it used to be.

Back before effective autofocus and good quality high ISO digital cameras that were affordable to the masses, a lot of nature photographers wanted desperately to get those shots.

Now they can. And now they do: Over, and over, and over again. Magazines are full of them. Flickr is full of them. Nature websites are full of them. And they all look alike.

What is all this got to do with kitsch?

I am not entirely sure, but I sense that there is a relationship between the clichéd state of current nature photography and the increasing amount of nature kitsch, such as the leaping wolf photograph that was recently disqualified from the competition it had won not because it’s such a bad photo (it is) but because the Spanish photographer apparently used a tame wolf in a wildlife park for the shot.

What is kitsch, anyway? There many definitions, but an essential ingredient is always an element of pretense. Kitsch is bad art that pretends to be important.

Our more detailed level, of course, kitsch plays to the crowd, always. It’s the gaudy sunset shot. It’s the baby in a floppy hat.

And (here’s the connection to wildlife photography) it’s the perfect eagle, soaring perfectly in a perfect sky, as opposed to the actual eagle, whose wing feathers are tattered and whose right leg is sprouting an ugly fungus.

Nature photography has lost touch, in a fundamental way, with nature; and driven by the rat race of technological improvement, it’s turned itself into a close cousin of paintings on velvet.

photo: The birdcracker, 2009