This is one of realism’s central paradoxes: in order to make nature appear truthful, it often has to render it less alive. What it privileges is not life’s flux but its arresting surface. A scientific plate, a detailed wildlife painting, or a high-resolution nature photograph may produce extraordinary knowledge of appearance, but appearance is never the same as being. Realism gives us the contour of a leaf while concealing the fungal networks beneath the soil; it reveals the plumage of a bird while obscuring migratory routes, ecological collapse, or the violence of collecting and classification. The more exact the image, the easier it becomes to forget the operations that made such exactitude possible.

 

When realism enters the terrain of landscape, its ideological stakes deepen further. The realism of western landscape painting has historically claimed to present nature as setting, vista, or territory. But landscapes are never just views. They are political arrangements of space, agencies, and relations. They teach us how to look, and by extension, how to possess or commune. European landscape traditions often transformed land into property through perspective, composition, and Christian imbued values of light and darkness. The horizon was not merely optical; it was juridical and colonial. Forests, mountains, rivers, and fields appeared available to the eye because they had already been organized for extraction, travel, mapping, or settlement. Realism in this context uncovered the grandeur of place
while obscuring histories of displacement, labor, and Indigenous presence.

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The nature of realism, then, is not to tell the truth about the world, but to make certain truths appear self-evident. That is why realism matters so deeply. It does not just show us nature. It teaches us what nature is allowed to mean.

 

This issue of Antennae, and the two that will follow, are dedicated to realism as a critical tool in ecology and the representation of the more than-human world. My gratitude goes to all the contributors to this issue, to Antennae’s academic board for its ceaseless support and expertise and to everyone else who has made this exploration possible.