The New Audubon
Once described by the New York Times as "the Audubon of fish," Prosek finds the comparison flattering but in some ways misleading.
"Audubon was painting a nature that was just being discovered by Europeans," he said. "Painting now is a very different process. I always feel like I'm in the process of depicting something we're losing very quickly." Nassau grouper like the one above are an endangered species, as are many of the subjects in Ocean Fishes.
Like Audubon, Prosek is a conservationist. (He even founded World Trout, an organization devoted to preserving native trout populations.) His task is a struggle, however, and not only because trout are threatened by development and climate change.
Conservation as an ideal is struggling, often unable to articulate why the well-being of a particular subspecies is more important than a profit, invoking nebulous ideals of biodiversity or making ecosystem service arguments that leave little room for sentiment, much less a pocket of trout that evolved for 10,000 years in the headwaters of a Croatian stream.
For Prosek, engaging with individual animals is an alternative to the usual conservation arguments — the seeds, he hopes, of a new conservation ethos.
Image: James Prosek (High-Resolution Version)