| > What inspired you to tell this story about a very unlikely hero, the magpie?
I had recently moved back to my home-state of Idaho after spending
nearly twenty years in New York and California. One of the first
things I noticed were these beautifully iridescent black and white
birds. Idaho has one of the largest concentrations of magpies in the
world and I couldn't imagine why, as a kid, I hadn't been fascinated
by them. Then I remembered I'd grown up hating magpies, hating them
for no deeper reason than my parent's and grandparent's hatred of
them. Everyone had seemed to despise magpies. "Dirty birds, they'd peck the eyes out of a new-born calf just for fun." I
didn't know if that were true; I'd never considered finding out. I'd
inherited a regional prejudice against an animal I knew nothing
about, a prejudice like most prejudices: planted young and nurtured
with a kind of willful ignorance. I decided to learn more about
magpies and my prejudice against them and that sounded like the
beginnings of a good story.
 > While you were telling a light-hearted story about a much-maligned bird, did you ever feel "Mad About Magpies" held a larger or deeper meaning?
For me, the deeper meaning is always the point. A light-hearted
piece that goes no further is just a diversion. But a light-hearted
piece that builds toward something more thought provoking, that's
good storytelling. I like to bait and switch, to take what appears
to be a goofy subject and incrementally push it into more serious
territory. For instance, with Mad About Magpies, I tried to use this somewhat
cartoonish bird as a way to look at our contentious relationship to
the whole of nature, to look at the way unexamined prejudices are
passed down, and how that leads to misplaced and often murderous ends.
> You were a photographer before you became a radio producer. Why did you add radio to your repertoire?
Frankly, I began to write and later produce radio out of a
frustration with the limitations of photography. 
For years I
traveled as part of freelance photographic crews on commercial
assignments all over the world. I assisted on the Sports Illustrated
Swimsuit Issue in Tahiti, climbed glaciers in Alaska, repelled into
Philippine caves and yet often learned very little about those places
and the people we photographed. By nature the camera can only record
surfaces, light bouncing off objects. That can lead to powerful
pictures, but it doesn't guarantee a depth of understanding.
Increasingly I wanted to get beneath the visual surfaces and the
camera just couldn't take me there. Writing and radio gave me the
tools to crack through that visual veneer and begin looking at the
underlying historical, cultural, and ecological forces that shape
what we see with our eyes.
> You have story in the May issue of the photo journal Orion about the limitations of photography. How do you think photographers will respond?
Several photographers have already reacted positively to the essay. They too have experienced the limitations inherent in trying to understand and illustrate the world by focusing exclusively on only one of the five senses. I try to make it clear in the piece that I'm not blaming photography or photographers for these limitations, but
focusing instead on our often unexamined cultural faith in the camera to clearing depict the world. Visual media is overwhelmingly popular. Today, we get most of our information visually—whether we create it ourselves with point-and-shoots, camcorders, or camera phones; or consume it through television, movies, video iPods, or
picture-heavy magazines and newspapers. The visual has eclipsed all other forms of sensing. My essay simply points out some of the blind spots created by that myopic view of the world.
I hadn't thought of it before, but a piece that would really be pertinent to a discussion of sight and the other senses (particularly sound) is a story I did for Living On Earth in 2004 called "The Sounds of Nature." In it I explain my personal switch from photography to sound and how that switch completely changed my view
of the world.
(Listen to Guy Hand's The Sounds of Nature)
 > How did you learn to make radio stories?
I began writing for magazines and eventually a public radio station
in central California asked me if I'd like to turn some of my print
stories into radio pieces (something I'd never considered). The
station gave me tips, I did a ton of research and experimentation,
got some assignments with national shows, and before long had filled
my camera bags not with lenses and cameras but microphones and
recorders. In a way it was an easy transition: I'd simply
substituted the sense of sound for the sense of sight. Yet that
sensory switch opened up a much larger (if less lucrative) universe.
> Have you produced a project that combined your interests in radio and photography?
I often shoot photos while I'm working on a radio or writing project,
but photography now takes a back seat to what I consider to be the
more interesting work of writing and radio. It took years, but I've
learned that a magpie is much more interesting than a picture of a
magpie.
|
Guy Hand is a independent radio producer whose work has appeared on
NPR's Living On Earth, Radio High Country News, and others. The
Society of Environmental Journalists named his two-part series on
Alaska's Tongass National Forest the best feature radio piece of
2002. A Nieman Foundation Report called it "a lesson in the art of
radio." 