The Eye of the Beholder: Applying Visual Analysis in an Historical Study of Lynxes’ Representations in the Bavarian Forest Region
AbstractRepresentation is never neutral, especially when it comes to agents devoid of their own voice. As such, wildlife has often been employed as a sort of leverage point, an emotional trigger aimed to deliver a certain message (see e.g., Cronin, 2011). The establishment of the Bavarian Forest National Park (BFNP) coincided with the return of large carnivores to the region, in particular, lynxes. Lynxes are endemic to the area; however, as in many other parts of Europe, the last free-roaming individuals were eradicated in the middle of the nineteenth century. In the past few decades, slowly, lynxes were both reintroduced or came back on their own volition, and that has created a considerable response from the population. There has been extensive coverage of the return of these animals both in local and regional media. Lynxes are also kept in the enclosures of the BFNP to afford visitors an unmediated look at the native charismatic megafauna. In this chapter, I analyse how lynxes have been represented in the local media, the newspaper Grafenauer Anzeiger, and discuss merits and drawbacks of visual analysis research method in understanding the change in attitudes towards these animals’ presence in the BFNP area. For that, I look at the archival and contemporary publications of the newspaper. It has been said that the precondition for people’s understanding of reality lays in fantasy, in imagining things to be true (Bergman, 2013). A visual analysis method can help uncover stories that do not necessarily come to the fore in text, and that, in turn, makes it possible to have a fuller grasp of one’s research object. Andrew Isenberg once said that “[our] representations of wildlife are inescapably expressions of human values” (Isenberg, 2002), and while texts are important in their own regard, visual analysis gives an opportunity to look behind a textual narrative to discern whether what we see of the wildlife corresponds to what we understand.
