Vernon Chalmers’ Bird Photography as Affect Theory: A Reflective–Philosophical Analysis
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| Yellow-Billed Duck, Woodbridge Island : Vernon Chalmers Photography |
“A fast duck does not race the wind - it becomes it. In motion, it forgets the river, the reeds, even the sky. It is only presence, winged and unbound.” - Vernon Chalmers
"This paper examines Vernon Chalmers’ bird photography - especially his Birds in Flight (BIF) practice - through the theoretical lens of affect. Drawing from the work of Spinoza, Massumi, Deleuze, Merleau-Ponty, and contemporary scholarship on affect theory, the essay explores how Chalmers’ photographic methodology embodies a phenomenology of intensity, relationality, and embodied perception. The argument positions BIF photography as a practice in which affect circulates among photographer, bird, environment, and camera system, generating pre-cognitive resonances that exceed representation. Affect is analyzed as force, motion, vitality, and embodied sensitivity - an ontological and epistemic mode revealed through the temporality and kinaesthetic demands of photographing birds in flight. Chalmers’ work is presented as a living example of affect theory in action, demonstrating how images can capture not only visual phenomena but also the energetic and existential conditions of being-with non-human life.
IntroductionVernon Chalmers’ bird photography, particularly his extensive practice in photographing Birds-in-Flight (BIF), is often described in terms of technical mastery, perceptual acuity, and contemplative awareness. Yet beneath these descriptive layers lies a deeper philosophical structure that resonates strongly with contemporary affect theory. Affect theory - rooted in the work of Spinoza and expanded by thinkers such as Deleuze, Guattari, Massumi, and Sara Ahmed - emphasizes the pre-conceptual intensities that move through bodies and environments. These intensities are forces rather than representations, movements rather than meanings, sensations rather than symbols (Massumi, 2002).
In this sense, Chalmers’ photography does not simply document birds; it registers affective encounters. The BIF moment - sudden liftoff, wing beat, change of direction, cut of air - is an event saturated with force. It is an expression of vitality in which the photographer’s embodied focus, perceptual anticipation, and technological extension (camera, lens, autofocus systems) converge with the unpredictable flight of another living being.
This paper argues that Vernon Chalmers’ bird photography can be conceptualized as an affective practice. It captures, expresses, and co-creates affective intensities between human and avian life. Through a synthesis of affect theory, phenomenology, and photographic philosophy, the analysis positions Chalmers’ BIF work as a lived enactment of affective relationality - where perception becomes more than sight, and photography becomes more than representation.
Affect Theory: Conceptual FoundationsSpinoza and the originary concept of affect
Affect theory originates in Spinoza’s understanding of affectus - the capacity of bodies to affect and be affected (Spinoza, 1677/2002). A “body” here is not merely a biological unit but any entity capable of relation, connection, transformation, or intensity. Affect is thus relational and dynamic; it precedes emotion and cognition. It is, as Massumi (2002) emphasizes, “a pre-personal intensity corresponding to the passage from one experiential state to another” (p. 27).
Chalmers’ photography exemplifies this conceptualization. The encounter between photographer and bird is never static. Each moment of flight contains a passage - a movement of intensification in which both bird and photographer undergo micro-changes in orientation, attention, and energy.
Deleuze, Guattari, and affect as force and becoming
Deleuze and Guattari (1987) elaborate affect as a mode of becoming: transitional intensities that generate new relational forms. Affect is not what something is but what it does - it is movement, momentum, and modulation. For them, animals (including birds) are carriers of affective becoming: “Animals are populations of affects” (p. 256).
BIF photography is, in this sense, a becoming-with. The photographer attunes to the bird’s kinetic logic, entering a co-creative rhythm. The encounter is not simply observed; it is participated in.
Massumi and intensity
Brian Massumi (2002) positions affect as intensity - autonomous, non-representational, and embodied. Affect exceeds the image, yet the image can hint at it. Photography then becomes an affective archive: a record of intensities that cannot be fully captured but can be sensed.
This aligns directly with Chalmers’ photographic practice, where the goal is not merely anatomical fidelity but the expression of motion, vitality, and the energic pulse of avian life.
Affect theory often intersects with phenomenology, particularly in the work of Merleau-Ponty (1962), who argues that perception arises through embodied engagement with the world. Perception is not passive reception but active participation: “We perceive in order to inhabit” (Merleau-Ponty, 1968, p. 45).
The embodied practice of photographing birds in flight
Chalmers’ BIF methodology exemplifies this embodied perception. Capturing a bird in flight requires attunement to:
- bodily posture
- kinaesthetic balance
- muscular micro-adjustments
- environmental cues (wind, light, background)
- anticipatory sensing of avian movement
This is perception as lived bodily intentionality - what Sheets-Johnstone (2011) calls the “kinetic intelligence of the body.” Chalmers’ approach is inseparable from this bodily way of knowing.
Camera systems as extensions of the body
Affect theory also accommodates technological extension. Hansen (2006) argues that digital images and camera systems participate in affective processes, becoming “embodied prostheses of perception” (p. 20). Chalmers’ continual exploration of autofocus systems, tracking algorithms, and lens behaviour thus forms part of an affective ecology where technology participates in relational intensities.
The camera does not merely record; it co-perceives.
The affective temporality of the “decisive moment”
Unlike static subjects, birds in flight create an affective temporality that is:
- sudden
- unpredictable
- fleeting
- rhythmic
- charged with vitality
The “decisive moment” in BIF photography is not a singular instant but a temporal flow of micro-events. Chalmers’ images register this flow, capturing time as intensity - a Deleuzian “time-image” (Deleuze, 1985).
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| Grey Heron, Table Bay Nature Reserve : Vernon Chalmers Photography |
A central aspect of affect theory is its critique of anthropocentrism. Affect circulates across species boundaries, forming cross-species relational fields (Haraway, 2008).
Birds as affective beings
Birds are uniquely affective animals: their flight expresses intensity, momentum, and freedom. Their worlds - air currents, heights, visibility - are experienced through motion. As Gibson (1979) argued, every animal perceives according to its ecological niche. Birds perceive affordances of the sky, wind, and motion; BIF photography attempts to register these affordances visually.
Chalmers’ photographs can be understood as capturing the affective ecology of avian life.
Human–bird entanglement
Affect theory conceptualizes human–animal relations as entanglements (Barad, 2007). Chalmers’ practice produces such entanglement. His images arise from:
- attentiveness to avian behaviour
- respect for distance and timing
- ethical co-presence in natural environments
- sensitivity to non-human rhythms
This relational stance is affective: a shared field of vitality where the bird’s behaviour shapes the photographer’s perception.
Flight is inherently affective. It is movement, becoming, force. Deleuze and Guattari (1987) suggest that “to fly is to deterritorialize,” meaning to break habitual forms of movement and perception. Chalmers’ BIF photography captures this deterritorialization, inviting viewers to sense the intensities of motion.
Although affect theory resists the reduction of experience to technique, Chalmers’ technical mastery is part of the affective assemblage. Technique generates the conditions for affect to become visible.
The affective dimension of autofocus and tracking
Autofocus tracking of moving subjects is not merely mechanical. It is anticipatory, relational, and temporal. The photographer must sense:
- how fast to pan
- how to align with the bird’s trajectory
- how to maintain affective continuity through the viewfinder
- These actions are expressions of affective attunement.
Shutter speeds and the aesthetics of affect
Fast shutter speeds freeze affective intensity. Slow shutter speeds blur motion, revealing affective traces. Chalmers frequently negotiates this tension, choosing settings that convey the kinetic vitality of wings, motion, and atmospheric flow.
Exposure and the emotional tonality of affect
Affect is tonal: it has gradations, weights, intensities. Lighting choices - backlighting, side lighting, diffuse lighting - shape the affective resonance of an image. Chalmers’ preference for natural coastal environments creates photographs infused with atmospheric affect.
Affect does not end with the photographer. It continues in the viewer’s experience.
Images as affective triggers
According to Massumi (2015), images can trigger affective responses that bypass cognition. In Chalmers’ BIF photography:
- the sudden lift
- the spread of wings
- the tension of feathers
- the blurred background of velocity
- produce sensations of freedom, vitality, and awe.
Viewers enter the photographer’s embodied encounter
Merleau-Ponty (1968) suggests the image is a “reversible” surface: viewers inhabit the perceptual field created by the photographer. In this sense, Chalmers’ images convey his attentiveness and embodied stance, allowing viewers to sense the affective event as if participating in it.
Affect as existential resonance
Affect in Chalmers’ photography often carries existential weight. Viewers encounter not just birds but the conditions of possibility for life, motion, and being. The bird becomes a symbol of agency, contingency, and transience. This existential affect aligns with contemporary aesthetic theory, which holds that images can evoke ontological awareness (Sinnerbrink, 2020).
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| Kestrel Falcon, Woodbridge Island : Vernon Chalmers Photography |
Drawing from the preceding theoretical frameworks, we can identify several ways in which Chalmers’ BIF photography functions as affect theory in practice.
1. It foregrounds relational intensity
Photography becomes a field of relation - not an act of capturing but of co-emergence. Bird, environment, photographer, and technological system form an affective assemblage.
2. It makes visible forces that exceed representation
Affect cannot be fully captured, but BIF images hint at invisible aerodynamic and kinetic forces.
3. It involves pre-cognitive attunement
The photographer responds intuitively - through embodied sensing and anticipatory movement - to avian behaviour.
4. It expresses vitality
Chalmers’ images show birds not as static taxonomic entities but as beings in motion - pulses of life, energy, and becoming.
5. It invites viewers into affective co-presence
Images act as conduits, transmitting pre-personal intensities to spectators.
Vernon Chalmers’ bird photography, and especially his BIF practice, can be fruitfully interpreted through the lens of affect theory. Rather than merely documenting avian behaviour, his images emerge from and express affective intensities - bodily attunements, relational fields, and temporal flows of motion. Chalmers’ work resonates deeply with Spinozist conceptions of relational capacity, Deleuzian ideas of becoming, Massumi’s framing of intensity, and Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology of embodied perception.
In capturing birds in flight, Chalmers participates in a co-creative rhythmic encounter between photographer, bird, environment, and technology. His practice is thus not only technical but ontological: it reveals the affective dimension of interspecies encounters. Ultimately, Chalmers’ bird photography can be seen as an affective art - one that registers the vitality of non-human life and invites viewers to sense the world anew." (Source: ChatGPT 2025)
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