Chapter 9

Descriptive Falsterbo Moments – or the art of equestrian photography made popular

Crispin Parelius Johannessen

Introduction

The published photographic series Falsterbo Moments (Taylor, 2015) showed an equestrian during the warm-up phase at a large international horse sports event in the south of Sweden. The dressage horse and rider were depicted in rather unusual moments of movement, some of them in sequences, compared to what is conventionally published today in the press.

The series of roughly 60 photographs were selected from the almost 1,600 images shot during a period of 70 minutes, on two separate days, averaging roughly 23 shots a minute.

136 Crispin Parelius Johannessen

I was positioned amongst the public fully visible with permission to photograph, but it was not a prearranged shoot with regard to position and timing of the subject. The subject had not been instructed how to perform in front of the camera, but as the event was open to the public he should expect to be photo- graphed. The rider had already been accused of equestrian brutality after an inci- dent a few months before and it was therefore interesting to photograph in relation to issues of documentation of abuse.1

The collection of photographs depicts the horse in poses where she appears to
be jumping around, rearing, and bucking (see Figures 9.1, 9.2). The horse’s neck
was often maximally flexed, causing at times the teeth to be pressured into the flesh of the shoulder. The high quality gave the opportunity to see details in the horse’s mouth, how the bit appeared to press deep into the tongue, which was bluish in colour. Other details were of muscle tension around the eye, the white of the horse’s eyeball was visible, giving the impression of the horse straining to see. The rider’s position appears unbalanced on the horse as it shows him falling backwards beyond his centre of gravity, giving the impression of staying on top of the horse by holding on to the reins attached to the two metal bits. The rider’s legs appeared  to be digging the spurs into the horse’s ribs, causing skin ripples which gave an impression of how deep they dug in. The horse’s noseband appears to pinch the  skin and flesh of the muzzle appear contorted and twisted, giving the impression of  the noseband digging into the horse’s flesh. The nostrils seem to open into maximal 4dilation, giving the impression of the horse straining to inhale more air.

Figure 9.1Still image  Falsterbo Moments

Figure 9.2  The practice of looking at horses

I offered them to the only publisher I knew who would be interested in making them visible to an audience, Epona.Tv, and the series was shared by  50,000 users of social media within the first 48 hours. As a result of this social  media visibility, over 30 national and international publications, mostly equine, reported on the publication of the images, and the controversy they generated.

The Fédération Equestre Internationale (FEI), the sole controlling authority for all international equestrian events, initially stated: The FEI finds these images extremely disturbing. We are very concerned about this incident and we are investigating it thoroughly. We have already contacted the Chief Steward at Falsterbo to ask for a full report specifically on this issue. (Taylor, 2015)  However, in a later press release they claimed no action could be taken against the rider for abusive riding as there was insufficient documentation (Taylor, 2015). The Chief Steward employed by the FEI to secure the welfare of the horses through on-site observation claimed they had seen no unreasonable or abusive riding in response (Taylor, 2015). This was based on observing the event with their naked eye, and they had, as far as I know, no supporting visual documentation to support the denial that any brutal riding had taken place. The FEI never responded to my offer of showing them all 1,581 photographs as only roughly 60 were published.

Part of the background of producing and publishing Falsterbo Moments was  that for some years I had been following the development in the press and social media of the conflict regarding brutality. These discussions also exposed a division within the equine audience of how to deal with photographic documentation and perception. It concerned photographs that showed mainly the controversial training method named rollkur. Rollkur contorts the horse’s neck into a hyperlexed posture potentially obstructing the horses breathing, smell, and vision. It was examined by equitation scientists as both mental and physical abuse. Today, equitation scientists believe this is adequately proven to be abuse in roughly 55 research projects (ISES, 2015). And yet despite this, the practice continues at equestrian events with little or no intervention. Despite there being a huge debate I could see, then and now, no official attempts, practices, or guidelines to secure visual documentation outside of the competition arena, in attempt to prove or  disprove abuse. Surely someone should be securing valid documentation? To do this of course one needs to discuss how to create the documentation and there appears to be little willingness to do so. The visual material from warm ups that caused controversy were a little undercover in style, with low quality production and usually dismissed as being attacks on the horse world from activists. With a few exceptions they were mostly published on social media with a claim that the photographs exposed rider brutality towards the horse in the sports, an opinion increasingly supported by a growing audience and scientists. There was ample research by equitation science to support the contention that the depicted postures and details could be interpreted as severely painful and damaging to the  horse, by loss of vision, ability to breathe, and postures relating to conflict behaviour and mental stress (ISES, 2015). The critics of these images, including the governing equestrian organisations, would, however, dismiss them as valid documentation exposing brutality because they were made by activists, bad photographs due to low quality, the wrong angles, and merely being moments in time, thus lacking in context. It seemed to me they were dismissing the allegations of brutality based on an attitude that it was the bad quality photography

making the equestrian appear brutal through visual manipulation, rather than photographic material describing brutality. As I have worked with both training  and teaching horse and rider I was concerned with the treatment of horses that I  experienced as brutal, not just in dressage, but in all disciplines. I am also edu-  cated as a fine art photographer and video artist and am relatively experienced as  to how the camera constructs vision. The reluctant and dismissive attitudes towards using photography as a tool to document were increasingly making me wonder what it would take to make equestrian visual documentation be received as meaningful and valid? How can the audience have such different ways of per-  ceiving the same material? Surely we should be able to perceive if the horse is suffering or not? Falsterbo Moments was an experiment of producing better quality documentation to see how the audience would receive it, and hopefully  push the question; don’t people see any impression of brutality, or is it that they  don’t they want the impression of brutality made visible?

Over 30,000 years ago an equine artist started to shape a horse with charcoal on  the stone wall of the cave Chauvet, in the gorges of Ardeche, in the south of France. The cave is believed to contain the oldest paintings of horses. I imagine  the artist viewed the horses from a vantage point, taking note of how they stood  and moved, close enough to see the position of the eyes, the directions the ears  are pointing and the degree of neck flexion. The horse would be opening its mouth and the nostrils would be dilating to circles. The artist went into the  darkness of the cave and painted with charcoal from the memory of his or her  perceptions, making anatomical decisions from, for us, an unknown intention. On one of the panels the artist had decided to paint four horses with various degrees of neck flexion and surprisingly large and rounded crests. The artist’s idea of the leg position is interesting, as one horse has eight legs. Is this perhaps  the artists first attempt at representing a horse in movement? The horse nearest  to the viewer shows clearly a horse with an open mouth which the archeologist Domenique Baffie interprets as a horse whinnying (Herzog, 2010). This contemporary interpretation of an ancient document might or might not be correct, as we see in later artworks; the horse with an open mouth is a popular aspect in the horse/human visual narrative, with many possible reasons, and opposing interpretations.

The practice of looking at horses

The Chauvet cave could be, as suggested by Tamsin Pickeral, where the documented journey of the horse and human relationship begins. Pickeral further claims, in relation to presenting the narrative of the horse in art, that  the horse and human relationship is “one of the longest love affairs to traverse  history, and it is an affair that has been catalogued by the hand of the artist”  (Pickeral, 2006, p. 6).

I am interested in exploring this cataloguing process as I am myself an artist contributing to this documented history with images such as Falsterbo Moments, but can they be be seen as contributing to one of the longest love affairs? Thus, by contextualising my own work I wish to explore how we create the visually  documented narrative and how we perceive it, from the Chauvet cave to today’s  equine photography.

For thousands of years humans have grappled with various ways of showing  the horse with different angles, postures, and facial grimaces, and for the longest  period of time, unaided by photographic technology. Do the details and informa-  tion seen in the visual documents confirm this suggested love affair? If so, we may wonder what has been included or excluded in this history presented as a love affair.

What the photographer saw

Stepping into the role of an equestrian sports-horse photographer, I travelled  around Europe as an accredited press photographer producing images for the equestrian press. I wanted to explore the conventions of equestrian photography  in sport, to understand the practices, and get behind the surface scene. This meant I had to educate myself as to what aesthetic ideals the equestrian sport publishers wanted. For showjumping the required image was mostly one in which the horse was shown mid-air across the jump, more in the upward movement rather than the downward phase. For dressage there would be a few more moments the press could publish. Usually they would involve front and hind legs at the highest phase of movement, the most flexed position, such as in the piaffe, passage or pirouettes. The neck should be flexed, but not too much as with rollkur, as this posture has never been permitted in competition. Another acceptable convention would show the horse at the maximum of leg extensions, such as in the extended trot or gallop. I spent some time analysing what the equine media wanted, and I made sure I became good at getting the perfect moment, the trophy shots, the ones that could be published. The more I did this, the more I became frustrated at the very limited range of moments that would be considered for publication, it seemed far more limited than I had ever previously imagined. In most sequences of motion there are potentially thousands of possible shots and yet I found that the ones we see all end up rather similar and more or less the same phases of motion. It all seemed to me about timing for the perceived perfect moment. In the pressroom I started feeling a bit out of place and impatient with the culture producing repeatedly the same trophy shots, the very same select moments in time, repeated again and again, the same poses, just with a different rider and horse, in a different location and time. It seemed to me that everyone was chasing the same trophies from the press photographers, to the publishers and the

139 Crispin Parelius Johannessen

audience. The seductive hunt for trophy shots had withered away into a distaste for continue selling photographs to the press. The critical artist in me was beginning to awaken, the artist in me that was trained to look where others do not look and question what lies behind what is shown, not least what is not shown and why?

As I am also from an experimental practice of photography and video I would 1upload my material and work with different ways of presenting it, slowing down video sequences, reanimating stills to move again, exploring the detail. I was  beginning to get an understanding of what I could see with the latest advances in  camera technology, a new world of information was opening up.

 I was building up a huge archive of photos that I knew would be unwanted by the equine press, and I wondered what the other photographers did with all the images unwanted by the press and glossy equestrian magazines? I wondered, why not show them? I wondered how can you not show them? I wondered how  many such unwanted images are immediately deleted from cameras, or hidden away in hard drives never to be seen?

It was increasingly clear that I was not shooting my camera at the same time  or in the same direction as other press photographers, and I wondered if my days  as an accredited press photographer were numbered, and sure enough my applications for accreditation started being refused. I felt I was observed in a  system so sensitive and restrictive as to realise I was not shooting in the conventionally acceptable direction and moment. Audiences started to approach me with accusations of being a nasty person, and I experienced evictions and threats of physical violence if I did not stop photographing. To shoot your camera at the wrong moment during an equestrian event can evoke strong responses from the organisers, riders, and audience even when it is in public areas. It is therefore not  just publishing photographs that appears problematic, but also shooting them in the first place. If these unseen photographs were merely the wrong moment with  the wrong angle, as many would insist, how could this explain that a part of the audience was completely convinced that they portray brutality and violence? In  my experience its really easy to take photos that look brutal and actually quite a  challenge to shoot the ones that give a harmonious impression. There are not  many moments that give you the trophy shot.

140 Crispin Parelius Johannessen

To understand the equine communities’ relationship to photography, I would  like to go back to an historical event, one of the more significant earliest projects of photographing the horse in motion, the work of Muybridge. It took roughly 34,000 years from the first equine paintings to the emergence of the camera, a  mechanical device, constructed to assist our naked eye in perceiving the horse

From Muybridge to today: seeing is not believing

Source: Photography by Crispin Parelius Johannessen. and it proved to be much better than our perception at capturing motion. The  motion shoots created by Muybridge had an enormous impact on how we understand vision, perception, nature and movement. The Muybridge photographs show us that in spite of thousands of years viewing horses, we had not really understood how they moved, and that our attempts at understanding this, without the camera, were to a large extent very different to how we had imagined. Photography gave us access to visual details so far unseen, unimagined and perhaps unbelievable? The cameras’ descriptions showed us that so much of the visual world eludes our perception and consciousness.  As the story goes Leland Stanford had made a bet as to whether all four legs of the horse are off the ground at the same moment, in the trot and canter. It was  impossible for the human naked eye to see this clearly, our eyes could not pick up such detail from the fast moving horse. To prove this idea Muybridge came up with the photographic evidence showing that all legs were off the ground at the same moment. The photographic project “Animal Locomotion” commenced in 1872 and was completed 1885. The photographic sequences initially depicted horses in motion. He developed this into lecture talks he called Descriptive Zoopraxography or the Science of Animal Locomotion Made Popular (Muybridge, 1893, pp. 4–34). If I have understood correctly, he would first describe in great detail how he constructed the shooting of the photographs, distances, angles, timing, and all the machinery involved. This was followed with showing 12 consecutive phases of a single step from each of the different gaits. This would be “illustrated by photographs the size of life, from nature, and comparisons made with interpretations of the same movements by artists of pre-historic, ancient, medieval and modern times” (Muybridge, 1893, Appendix A, p. 2). He would finish by showing collections of still images put into motion by the zoopraxiscope, recognised by some as the start of the moving image. The talk gave the audience, for the first time, an opportunity to compare the still and moving  

 Figure 9.3 Muybridge freeze from Falsterbo.

image, as well as comparing the photographed horse with the painted and sculpted interpretations that had preceded it.
Muybridge proved that all the horse’s legs are off the ground at the same time, thus establishing photography as a tool to record information that our eye cannot see. The value for scientific understanding after this is beyond doubt proved by today’s extensive sophisticated developments in photographic technology. Used in research helping us perceive and analyse what our biological eye cannot see, such as with photo finishes. It is perhaps also here we first experience the idea in an equine context of the camera as an objective window onto a reality that we otherwise don’t access.
One who wrote most extensively about how our ideas about vision and perception changed with Muybridge’s work is Edwin Ray Lankester. He was stunned at how different the photograph’s information was compared to how we  had previously imagined it to be, which indicated the inadequacy of our naked eye perceptions. He identifies in Egyptian and Greek equine representation some 100 years bc, that there seemed to be only four commonly used poses to depict the horse in movement, and none of these were correct compared to the newly established photographic evidence which showed
[...] that the poses used by artists at different times and in different parts of the world to represent the ‘galloping’ of horse have no correspondence to any of the poses actually assumed by a horse as now demonstrated by instantaneous photography.
 (Lankester, 2008, p. 36)
It is this point that I believe Benjamin later expanded upon. For what were the  psychological effects upon us learning that our vision is not veridical, that the  way we see the world may be limited and that our perception does not accurately  represent reality? That a mechanical device can reveal what remains otherwise unseen must from an evolutionary and psychological perspective be a frighten-ing insight; that the camera has possibility to expose the unseen, the unexpected, the unintended, the unbelievable, the unwanted, the shocking, the unimaginable, that which is beyond our conscious grasp. This is what I understand Benjamin means by the camera exposing the secret, the optical unconscious:

Where as it is commonplace that, for example, we have some idea what involved in that act of walking (if only in general terms), we have no idea at  all what happens during the fraction a second when a person actually takes a  step. Photography with its devices of slow motion and enlargement, reveals  the secret.
 (Benjamin, 1931, p. 310)
It is perhaps these aspects of the equine photograph that we sense in the accounts of the first equestrian audience as they appeared to acknowledge and celebrate the photographs exposure of the photograph in a scientific light, but at the same time they express a dislike to some of the still images. Apparently, according to Hans Christian Adam: 3

The problem was that on their own, some of the individual photographs  showed quite grotesque attitudes, and these were often challenged verbally 6 and in caricature because they ran counter to the pet prejudices that had 7 been established for centuries in the history of art. The conversion from still 8 to moving images would plainly demonstrate their authenticity. 9

(Adam, 2009, p. 17) 10 11 There appears to be an ambivalence in the camera’s ability to make visible 12phenomena, secrets, that are beyond human perception, on the one hand enlight- 13 ening and useful, on the other hand perhaps disturbing, shocking, and frighten- 14 ingly revealing. An audience’s shock from seeing equestrian brutality exposed 15 by the camera is already present when Muybridge showed his work in the 1870s. 16 17 The rapid movement by different animals were most interesting: and hurdle- 18 racing by horses – the very whipping process being visible – brought down 19 the house. – Boston Herald. 20 (Muybridge, 1893 p. 14) 21 22 We may wonder what it was the audience did believe or disbelieve with the 23 accuracy of the positions? What did they react to as grotesque attitudes? What 24 were the impossible absurdities? The impossible angles? The detail of the whip- 25 ping? Do we see here the start of the concept of a bad photograph? The “bad 26 photograph” as in those photographs that do not qualify as trophy images. 27 28 Mr Meissonier’s critical guests were evidently sceptical as to the accuracy 29 of many of the positions; but when the photographs were turned rapidly, and 30 made to pass before the lantern, their truthfulness was demonstrated most 31 successfully. – Standard, London. 32 (Muybridge, 1893, p. 13) 33 34 On revolving the instrument, the figures that have been derided by so many 35 as impossible absurdities, started into life, and such a perfect representation 36 of a racehorse at full speed as was never before witnessed was immediately 37 visible. – The Field, London. 38 (Muybridge, 1893, p. 14) 39 40 Isn’t it curious to note the audience keen to see the still images reanimated as is 41 a popular request even today? It is as if still images present a distortion of the 42 truth and the moving image is the reliable representation, despite the knowledge 43 that the moving image is nothing but a construction through many still images 44

1 put together. Is it more popular as the moving images are closer to how our 2 naked eye perceives the horse in motion? Do we prefer to see the moving image 3 as it does not give us the time to see the detail? Details that were unimagined, 4 the unseen, the unintended, and unwanted? Perhaps the secret revealed is the 5 ugliness of the equestrian image, or even the ugliness in the relationship between 6 horse and human?

7 One thing is for sure and that is that the equestrian community had an ambiv- 8 alent relationship to the still images right from the start of their production, 9 setting the premise for the conventions for what we may, or may not, publish, or

10 not even permit ourselves to photograph. The question is what we do with the 11 ugliness that emerges? And what function do the few photographs selected for 12 publication play? This may seem obvious, but I think the point should be made 13 that the equine images as we see them today are a constructions developed 14 through a 150 years of rigorous selection, of what we like and don’t like to see, 15 rather than an exposure of what photography presents us with. Lankester, dis- 16 cussing Muybridges work, was already suggesting how our perception is 17 also highly selective “We are always unconsciously forming lightening-like 18 judgements by the use of our eyes, rejecting the improbable, and (as we con- 19 sider) preposterous, and accepting therefor ‘seeing’ what our judgment approves 20 even when it is not there” (Lankester, 2008 p. 41).

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24 An experienced mushroom forager, Inke, invited me to hunt down the mush- 25 room as there was apparently an abundance in her woods. Just as I had expected 26 I didn’t see any and Inke sees them all over the wood. As her bags are rapidly 27 filling she barely needs a second of overview before she sees her new patch to 28 pick while I stand with my empty bags. I seem to be blind. She has showed me a 29 few prime examples, and I can kneel down beside her, follow her finger, and see 30 them. As I stand up I’m mushroom blind again, my eyes simply won’t identify 31 the small trumpet-like brown shapes in the moss. I know they are there judging 32 by Inke’s bags, and yet I don’t believe it, as I simply can’t see them. Inke men- 33 tions to me that they grow in circles over quite large areas, and shows me a 34 prime example of this. A swooping trail of small brown dots forms a perfect 35 circle in the green moss. Within minutes I had found two circles of my own, 36 moving from blindness and disbelief to successfully seeing for myself that they 37 were there. Inke’s advice had shifted my focus from searching for a single small 38 shape to looking for a large pattern. It seems I needed a very clear visual 39 example of this before my brain would identify them.

40 Perception is how the brain processes information from the senses. It appears 41 that several scientists share the opinion that the brain is presented with much 42 more information than it can possibly process (Lotto, 2009). In the process of 43 perception the brain must make some decisions about which information to pri- 44 oritise to avoid overload. The brain seems to compensate the rather limited

You don’t see it until you believe it

retinal information it can take in by predominantly two areas, having a catalogue 1 of concepts which are used to simulate what the brain thinks is happening, and 2 the other is perceiving through context. The neuroscientist Nikos Konstantinou 3 formulates it in the following way: 4

5 The human brain does not mirror reality for us, it has rather evolved to con- 6 struct reality for us. What it does is it takes information from the sensory 7 organs, the eyes, the nose, the ears and constructs a reality that is largely 8 based on a few things. The first thing that influences how the brain con- 9

structs reality is the context, the context within which we receive informa- 10 tion from sensory organs ... the second thing that influences how the brain 11 constructs reality is previous experiences with the world, the things we 12 know, the things we learn, the things we remember. 13

(Konstantinou, 2014) 14 15 For me it seems obvious that the long hours I spent working on the still images 16 were adding to my visual catalogue, or visual concepts, so that perceiving 17 equestrians in movement with my naked eye, I could perceive very different 18 information than I had previously to working with enlarging photographs and 19 freeze framing video. You need a visual concept of something before you see it 20 and stills are good at giving you these concepts and developing your perception. 21 Seeing is believing may be less true than suggesting that you don’t see it until 22 you believe it. Seeing moments of time will then offer a visual concept for your 23 brain to recognise it elsewhere. If you mostly have trophy images in your visual 24 catalogue then that is also very likely the only equestrian visual concepts your 25 brain has to use in constructing your perception. There could be a very fine line 26 between really not perceiving impressions of brutality, as you simply don’t have 27 the visual concepts, or being wilfully blind, once you have been exposed to con- 28 trary visual concepts such as Falsterbo Moments. 29 Dr Iris Bergmann’s research is interested in finding out the specific values 30 people include in their understanding of what equine welfare is. In horse culture it 31 is apparent that people do not share the same definitions of what constitutes 32 equine welfare (Epona.TV, 2015). To get an understanding of the value system 33 people working in the horse racing industry and animal welfare organisations 34 have, she applied a method of research known as photo elicitation, which employs 35 questions such as: how do you describe the image? What is it you see? She asked 36 her interviewees to describe a collection of images showing everyday scenes from 37 the racecourse. One of the images showed a racehorse opening its mouth with a 38 bit in and the tongue tied with fabric as the handler held onto the reins attached to 39 the bit. Another image was of a horse standing with its head high, eyes slightly 40 rolling and looking over its shoulder as the handler tries to pull him round. She 41 compared their descriptions. From the people that were working for the welfare 42 organisations the images were described as showing stressful and abusive situ- 43 ations for the horses. They seemed to be more aware of the whole image, what 44

1 was going on in the horse’s environment and how the horse was relating to it, and 2 that this was of an ethical concern to them. However,
3
4 the others who are coming from the industry normalise it. They see it as a 5 normal activity, a normal aesthetic of the horse that is nothing to be con- 6 cerned about because it’s just the way things are and this is the way things 7 have always been.

8 (Epona.TV, 2015)

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10 This process of photo elicitation is rather similar to my training as an artist, 11 where my tutors and fellow students would sit for hours describing how we per- 12 ceived each other’s art projects. Everyone saw different things, as we all had such 13 different personal experiences and had different opinions. Though I remember 14 this as boring, I do realise what an incredibly useful lesson it was in under- 15 standing and how subjective perception is. By changing the context of works we 16 reconsidered the radical shifts our perception may take. We were drilled in think- 17 ing through how changing the viewing context changes the meaning of our art 18 projects, something which is supported by today’s research into perception. As 19 Konstantinou formulates it: “The first thing that influences how the brain con- 20 structs reality is the context, the context within which we receive information 21 from sensory organs” (Konstantinou, 2014). This is a very important lesson to 22 learn, depending on where you place images you will get different perceptions of 23 them. We can remove images from their context and by placing them in a new 24 context we question the perceived meanings of them. What I believe is that eques- 25 trian photographic images are hugely context sensitive, with the very same image 26 you can place them in a context priming them as trophy images, but in another 27 context the very same information may be perceived as documents of abuse. Con- 28 trolling the placement of the equestrian image is vital depending on how you wish 29 them to be perceived. Where some see love others see suffering.
30 Looking at painting and sculpture a very considerable number of horses are 31 depicted with contorted facial grimaces showing open mouths, lips curling back 32 exposing their teeth, rolling eyes, dilated nostrils, as well as various degrees of 33 flexion of the neck. These details are usually portrayed with a human somehow 34 engaging with the horse through use of bits, reins, spurs, and whips. These non- 35 photographic artistic works have been presented across the world for thousands 36 of years in great collections, galleries, and museums with apparently, to my 37 knowledge, little objection from the equestrian community claiming that it does 38 not really look like that or that they are bad works of art. In art the horse’s facial 39 expression has often been a focal point in the work, though in equestrian photog- 40 raphy I wonder if the face does not become less prominent?
41 It would appear that people interpret equine faces with details such as rolling 42 eyes, open mouths etc. very differently depending on which form and context 43 they are perceived in. That the horse’s mouth is open in such a vast amount of 44 equine representation is a detail worth investigating far more than is possible

here. Perhaps viewers may assume that the horse breathes like us, through the 1 mouth? But the horse only breathes through its nose and cannot breathe through 2 its mouth. Scientific research has shown that breathing may be seriously 3 restricted by the opening of the mouth. Flexion of the neck has also been scien- 4 tifically researched showing that it makes breathing harder for the horse. If you 5 for example question the horse’s ability to breathe and swallow with its neck in 6 flexion and mouth open, you may start to see that from the earliest equestrian 7 depictions to today, the horse may very well be depicted as suffering breathless- 8 ness, if not even quite simply suffocating (Mellor and Beausoleil, 2017). This 9 opens up the possibility for us to review the history of equestrian representation 10 as presenting documents of equine distress, rather than accomplishments of great 11 beauty, nobleness and powerful superiority, as is popularly done. The same goes 12 for artistic and sports horse photography, if you believe rolling eyes and open 13 mouths to be signs of distress it is hard to enjoy the accomplishments or beauty 14 of the horse. If you believe it is similar to the human athlete you may very well 15 enjoy it on an aesthetic level, or perhaps not see it at all, certainly not understand 16 that there may be cause for ethical concern. It is not unreasonable to think that 17 how we perceive them affects how we treat them. There is almost no scientific 18 research into what equine facial grimaces may actually be expressing, apart from 19 Gleerup’s (Gleerup, 2015) examinations of equine expressions of pain in a clin- 20 ical context. This research is complicated by the difficulty of getting accurate 21 feedback from the horses, confirming what we may identify as expressing such 22 as states of pain or fear. The horse’s own voice remains therefore rather elusive 23 in deciding how we, as humans, can decide if it is experiencing abuse or not. 24 However, the neuroscientist Feldmann Barrett argues that even though we know 25 aspects of human facial expression it is still very hard for us to perceive facial 26 expressions accurately. “If you show a face on its own, versus if you pair it with 27 a voice or a body posture or a scenario, the face is very ambiguous in its 28 meaning” (Feldman Barrett 2017). 29

Conclusion

My intention with Falsterbo Moments was to create photographic documentation that would evoke questions to the viewer, such as: do you see the impression of  brutality in photographic documentation, or do you not want such impressions of brutality made visible? The images were constructed so that they could not 36 easily be dismissed as being of too poor quality, the wrong angles, or moments  in time without context. From the responses, I found that there were almost none  that seriously contradicted that the photographs give an impression of brutality. FEI stated in a press release: “The FEI finds these images extremely disturbing”. 40 A statement from Hestens Værn read:

The photos are cause for concern because what we see in the photos is not  good horse welfare and shows obvious conflict behaviour in the horse” and

1 “In the photos, the horse is displaying clear conflict behaviour and that is  not good horse welfare. We cannot, based only on the still images, tell if  horse abuse is occurring and therefore a violation of the law. If this was not 4 just one moment in time, officials should have intervened during the event.  (Taylor 2015. www.epona.tv/blog/updated-falsterbo-moments)

And a response from the Danish Equestrian Federation stated that:
The number of photos and the fact that they depict several different training sessions gives us the impression that the horse is clearly expressing conflict  behaviour and there is a lack of harmony between the horse and rider which  is not in accordance with good horse welfare.
(Taylor, 2015. www.epona.tv/blog/updated-falsterbo-moments)

Despite the fact that the FEI and other governing bodies acknowledged the 16 photographs as extremely disturbing and displaying clear conflict behaviour and that is not good horse welfare, they were not willing to use the photographs as documentation of horse abuse, which is a violation of Swedish law, and against  the FEI code of conduct. It could have been quite simple to assess the photographs in relation to equitation science’s research and make a credible claim that abuse had occurred. And yet this did not happen.

The FEI investigation as I understood it did not use the photographs as evid-  ence against the rider for abusing the horse. Not because they did not give the impression of brutality, but because they contradicted the stewards’ report of the  event, a statement based on naked eye observation with no technological assistance. To the stewards my photographs gave a contrary impression to their own  observation, and it was this statement that seemed to be decisive as to whether there had been an abusive situation or not. “We the stewards, consider the com-  petition has been carried out, despite the weather, in a calm and relaxed way  with so many young horses” (Helgstrand 2015).

It would appear that the stewards’ eyewitness observation stood in contrast to  the interpretation of the photographs, but it was the stewards’ observation that  became the privileged witness of the event. During the photographed event the  stewards and I were a few metres apart, looking in the same direction. From  experience I know they are often more concerned with the presence of me pho-  tographing, rather than the presence of what I am photographing. The stewards distrust me as a photographer as they know I do not respect written publishing  practices, and I suspect they have little knowledge of photographic process and  perception. For me it was apparent we were not witnessing a calm and relaxed  situation, but one of obvious brutality, which it is the stewards’ job to protect the  horse from.

Our interest in understanding the horse visually appears to have been central  to our development of photography and understanding of vision and perception. It would seem, however, that this has resulted in the equestrian having a very

148 Crispin Parelius Johannessen

ambivalent relationship to the camera and its processes. As I understand it there 1 has been a known dilemma since the emergence of high-speed photography. We want to use the camera for producing trophy images, but we also have problems dealing with the camera’s aspects of revealing the unseen, the unknown, the unimagined. Perhaps the camera has psychologically terrorised the equestrian  community with its potential uses; at times a useful tool to describe the “longest love affairs to traverse history”, at other times a tool that messes up the documented love narrative really badly with exposing impressions of abuse.

The regulatory publishing practices may very well function to keep the mon- strosities of equestrianism from being exposed and seen, and social media has

defiantly made the equestrian image harder to control in such a way. To what extent this practice has been knowingly applied to hide aspects of equestrianism I can only suspect. I do however know that in my huge archive of photography very little of it is considered publishable, and that this must apply for a far greater amount of material than my own and that there is a vast amount of visual information that is never seen by an audience. If you work in the trade of creating equestrian images you probably know this, however for the larger part of the audience they don’t really know what they don’t get to see. I would go as far as saying that denying an audience to view the larger part of what informa- tion the camera records is a form of censorship, conscious or unconscious, and the use of trophy image as a superimposed filter of how the equestrian should really be seen.

A practice of publishing photography secrets, which shows more of the unim- agined, the unseen, the unintended may have the effect of expanding our visual catalogue, and therefor also broadening our perception of the horse. We need to see more not less.

Note

1 At the time the rider was placed under a two-year probationary period for the use of the
double bridle following an incident during a private stallion show hosted by Helgstrand 31

Dressage, where his horse could be seen with an open mouth and an unmistakably blue, squashed tongue for prolonged periods of time.

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