Miranda Loud
By Alice Waugh
Do animals have feelings just as people do? Do they communicate? Do they deserve our consideration and respect as fellow species? Lincoln native Miranda Loud answers a heartfelt “yes” to these questions through her story-telling work in video and photography, including the photos and stories of dogs that have been hanging in the Lincoln Public Library this summer.
Loud will be at the library for a closing reception on Wednesday, August 28 from 5-7 p.m., to screen some of her films and offer prints of her other photos for sale to benefit Naturestage, the nonprofit organization she founded in 2005 to build empathy and understanding for other species through visual and performing arts. The showing will include excerpts from footage she shot this this summer of people talking about their connections with cows and with dogs, as well as short films from The Elephant Project and Buccaneers of Buzz: Celebrating the Honeybee.
The elephant and honeybee projects as well as dog exhibit are part of Naturestage’s One Language Project, which consists of animal portraits, essays by pet owners, and short films about interspecies bonds. The photos and stories will remain on display at the library until August 31 but will reappear in an exhibit at Emerson Hospital in Concord in October.
Photos and stories of dogs in another version of the exhibit now at the Lincoln Public Library.
“I really wanted to make the viewer stop and look and say ‘That looks almost like a person in there’,” said Loud, who grew up in Lincoln and now lives in Watertown. She hopes her work will prompt viewers to think more deeply about not just exotic species in other parts of the world but also the cows, horses, dogs and other animals they may see every day.
While the media tends to focus more on animals that are endangered or that seem to have a sophisticated means of communication, Loud’s work “sort of challenges people to think of the value of other species not based on how we might quantify their intelligence, and what it would be like if we didn’t look at ourselves as separate,” she said. “What is that connection we have? What makes us similar? ‘One Language’ is the language of emotion.”
Loud, 44, started doing photography and film-making just a few years ago. She began her career as a musician—she earned her bachelor’s degree from Wellesley College and a master’s in organ performance from the Eastman School of Music—and still earns part of her living as a church organist and singer with the Handl and Hayden Society. As owner of Waltham-based Orpheus Photography, she also does portrait and wedding photos and videos.
“The more I sang, the more sensitive I got to my environment and the more I realized I didn’t think it was enough to be just performing music,” Loud said. “I saw that the world was in trouble; there were too many imbalances, and I wanted to be part of the problem-solving.” She taught herself how to shoot and edit video, which she sees as a more effective tool than music for bringing about social change, “to capture some of the stories I was discovering” and give a voice to other species.
It may seem counterintuitive to move from a sound-based art form into visual media, “but it’s a fairly natural thing to do. In music, you have to have a sense of tempo and pacing, and that goes into the editing,” Loud said. As a young adult, “I chose to go into music as opposed to visual arts, but now I’m at the point in my life where I’m bringing everything together.”
Among her influences are “Animals Make Us Human: Creating the Best Life for Animals” by Temple Grandin, an autistic woman and professor of animal behavior, and The Moral Lives of Animals by Dale Peterson. That book also mentions another former Lincoln resident, Katy Payne, who collaborated with her then-husband Roger Payne on pioneering research into humpback whale sounds (the Ocean Alliance research institute was headquartered on Weston Road for many years and is now based in Gloucester). Katy Payne, a bioacoustician who discovered the phenomenon of long-distance infrasonic communication among elephants, heads the Elephant Listening Project in Ithaca, NY.
Loud has lots of ideas for other projects, including a multimedia e-book based on her Naturestage blog. In the meantime, she hopes to raise $50,000 this year to fund videos for the One Language Project and is looking for more Naturestage board members who love animals and the arts.
“I’m constantly reinventing myself,” she said.
This article incorporates a correction made on August 27. The original version had incorrect information about Katy Payne.