There is no water, no movement, no understanding of the whole shark. We can only view it in pieces when current and pressure are missing.
The table, small and unceremonious, competes for our attention; evoking dissection, display, and consumption. The silver scar at the center of the table pulls our thoughts to what violence created it. Easily hidden by pre- or post-photographic processes, it distracts us from considering the violence that brought us the shark.
Fins and gills are visible but separated from their meaning; smoothing their edges. The tail’s power is draped over the end of the table, disregarded. The shock of blue as the eye floats upwards replaces the sinister myth of black irises and replaces it with unrequested calm. The snout, more dolphin-like than shark when the mouth is obscured, neutralizes the business-end of a threat. The countershading has been muted into a gradient of greys, spoiling the surprise of being seen.
Every choice softens what scares us, gives us time to search for connection to a ‘civilized’ predator. Shark asks us to sit with separation, tugging at the unearned intimacy of mourning.
What power, wonder, kinship is lost when we only become legible in stillness? Unsettling the Techniques of the Observer in the 21st Century
Akshaya Tankha, Ph.D.
Assistant Professor, Art History

In Richard Learoyd’s Shark, the image of an aquatic animal laid out on a nondescript table slips between the known trope of the natural history specimen and what might be characterized as a comparably illegible encounter with the absence of life itself. If the scale of the print, the shallow depth of field, and the striking quality of colors afforded by Learoyd’s room-sized camera and positive photographic process enhance our forensic engagement with the body as an object of curiosity, these features also uncannily intensify our experience of it as a body without breath or coursing blood. The work is characterized by a tension, with the figure both framed in a capacity that feeds our desire to appreciate it in distanced terms as a marine fish while also made available to us in such visually intimate detail, confronted as we are with the listless eye, the patches of discolored skin, and specks of dried blood, among other features, which unravels the former comfort of familiarity. This dissonance is visually mirrored in the shark’s simultaneous presentation on an examiner’s station and suspension in an amorphous expanse that evokes the sublime of the ocean.
If the photographic image was an outcome of a longer history of the modernist construction of the observer as a detached knowing subject, Learoyd’s re/turn to a form of making images akin to pre and early photographic technologies surfaces as a kind of labor that ultimately serves to sharpen a lens on the viewer. The piece reminds us that the observing body today is as much a component of new technologies that constitute vision in the age of the fabricated image. As such, Learoyd’s Shark marks the unsettling distance that separates the current regime of digital and AI-generated imagery from the vital urgency to see—and sense—from a ground/location and in relation, which is staged in the unresolved oscillation that the photograph enacts between ‘still life’ and ‘stilled life’. Our Kinship Responsibilities to You, Shark
Holly Barker, Ph.D., Curator, Diasporic Oceania & Asias, Burke Museum of Natural History and Culture
Ronalei Gasetoto, Activation Lead, Oceania, Burke Museum of Natural History and Culture
Emma K. Wong, Artist Studio Coordinator, Burke Museum of Natural History and Culture APOLOGY: “We are sorry, Shark. Our systems have done violence to you and your loved ones. You are far from home and deserve better than this.”

SELF-REPRESENTATION: “What is your name? Who gets to speak on your behalf? Where is your home?”

ETHICS: “Who claimed the right to take you from your home? What would it look like for you to return to a place of belonging or home?”

(RE)SEARCH: “Is there wisdom from the ocean you want to share? What knowledge do you hold?”

CARETAKING: “How can we caretake for you as our family? How have you been a caretaker for your kin?”

JUSTICE: “What can we do to honor you and your life, and to support the next generation of Sharks? What does justice look like for you?”

Museums have much work to do. As museum practitioners from the Burke Museum of Natural History and Culture, we share questions that highlight how we contemplate our positions of power while centering respect, responsibility, and relationality in our (care)work.
Apology, Self-Representation, Ethics, (Re)search, Caretaking, and Justice (and more) are core values that inform how we steward and nurture the belongings and communities connected to the Diasporic Oceania & Asias collections at the Burke.
When we treat the Shark as kin, we return agency to the stories, relations, and lifeways the Shark carries.