Landscape Photography In Anthropocene And Views On Environment

Within this essay I will be investigating weather our view on the world that we are living in can be changed or influenced by the type of images that in this age of mass media, we seem to be drowning in. I am interested in particular with how images of landscapes (both urban and natural) within the Anthropocene are documenting climate change as it happens yet, there are so few people talking about this in consideration of the scale of the issue and some even deny the fact that there are any current and important environmental issues today. Could this be because over time we have become numb to the effects of these graphic, shocking images?

The impact of climate change is most commonly shown to audiences in the form of images of both natural and man-made disasters or aerial shots that give the viewer a broad sweeping view of a landscape or event. Although these images may have some level of impact on the viewer they also present images that they can somewhat disassociate from as they have no relevance to their day to day life and that in itself raises the question as to whether landscape photography has developed simply to document our irreversible impact on the planet, or if it can still make a genuine difference.

The term Anthropocene overall aims to define the Earth's most recent geologic time period as being human-influenced (this is due to the geological time periods that came before being largely or solely environmentally influenced). However the begining of the Anthropocene is an highly debatable subject between perfetionals and the everyday man, with some saying we should count the start from the beginning of man or the start of evolution, and others stating that is should begin at the emergence of the industrial revolution, which began in Britain during the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. This revolution saw to the beginning of widespread pollution of land, as new factories pumped out smoke, and a cocktail of waste products into the air and waterways on a mass scale. Meanwhile, urban areas (towns and citys) started to expand at a fast rate, which only resulted in new additions being made to the ever-growing list of environmental problems facing us.

The most reasont evidence suggests that by the mid-nineteenth century the burning of coal to power the factories and other industrial sites that were spreading across Europe and the United States of America had already begun to nudge global temperatures upwards. However, the concept of the Anthropocene has been harshly criticised by some scholars for appearing to suggest that humanity as a whole is responsible for the environmental damage caused, yet in fact, it is a highly unequal process, with western societies accounting for the vast majority of energy use, industrial production, and pollution in the past, present, and foreseeable future. Nevertheless, the Anthropocene has begun to inspire a new generation to understand more clearly who and what is responsible for the ecological changes going on around us and how we can affect them, however unfortunately it seems as if many still see humans as the most important, superior beings that can use nature and the environment as a never-ending warehouse of resources to serve only our needs.

However, this is not the case at all rather, our world is a balanced system upon which all life forms, including plants, animals and humans depend for survival and with the rate that we are destroying our planet its not sustainable for many, of any life forms to remain in the environment. This fact tells us that it is not only necessary but crucial for us to treat the natural environment with a much greater concern and respect because soon the amount of damaged inflicted on the environment and the species with in it simply won’t be reversible. However still today there are thousands, even millions of cases similar to that which I have described where humans have made a decision to alter the natural world for their own benefit, but the results are never as promised and almost always end badly on nature side and sometimes for humanity as well. And of course, one of the main ways these occurrences and consequences documented and presented to the public is though landscapes being photographed and shared constantly shared on a globe scale.

According to some people, perfectional and photography enthusiasts, landscape photography is enbodied by the work of photographer Ansel Adams who first introduced the world to the dramatic landscapes of the American West. As being a well-known and passionate conservationist, Adams sought to inspire the preservation and conservation of the landscapes he captured on film. He is known to have said “if you take photographs, make the photographs useful” (British Journal of Photography, 2019). Unfortunately, just as in many other areas of the world, the landscapes that Adams photographed have changed dramatically and the life forms that once existed within then have become ever more endangered or sadly extinct. Since Ansell Adams’ work took the world by storm the art of l andscape photography itself has also changed. Contemporary landscape photographers, such as Edward Burtynsky, are more likely to explore the lasting effects of the damage inflicted by human activities than the beautiful, pristine wilderness, as Adams did in his work.

Burtynsky is regarded as one of the world's most accomplished contemporary photographers, whose imagery explores the collective impact we as a species are having on the planet; an inspection of the human systems we've imposed onto natural landscapes and the consequences of these actions. Burtynsky’s estanding photographic depictions of global industrial landscapes have been part of collections in well over sixty major museums around the world, these include musemums such as the Museum of Modern Art, the Guggenheim Museum in New York, the Tate Modern in London, and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art in California. Now for me what I find particularly interesting, is that while Burtynsky’s image of a river stained a bright crimson by Nickel mining would in most photographers’ hands would become a direct call to environmental action, however in his hands the call does not come from him, but its almost as if we are questioning ourselves.

Its widely known that when it comes to increasing awareness of climate change globerly its now reasonably well accepted that photographs of polar bears sat on top of melting icebergs are not as effective for changing public behaviour in meaningful ways as they once were. This suggests to me that this type of dramatic representation of climate change is just not enough and can actually have the opersit effect and end up being disempowering and alienating. In this case the more affective images are those that allow us (the audience) to establish a more personal connection with the consequences of climate change. So do the photographs produced by photographers such as Burtynski and Maisel allow us to connect the causes and consequences of human abuse and misuse of our planet or do they push us to further disassociate from what is happening around us?

The contradictions embedded in the origins of the photographs created by these photographers only mirror the contradictions embedded in to today society. So, whilst these images help us to gain a deeper understanding of particular issues and might compel more thoughtful people to action (such as protests, environmental clean ups, volunteer work, etc.) looking at Burtynski’s grand yet horrifying images may have the opposite impact on others. The sheer scale and severity of the destruction might leave people to feel more helpless than ever and that their efforts to make a difference may be feeble in the grand scheme of things.

As it has been said by Dennis Dimick, who previously worked as the national geographic magazines executive environment editor that “Photographs have the power to grab you emotionally and intuitively... Data charts, graphs, they can help provide intellectual substance, but the photographs are the things that are going to make people connect to a story, because they can make people go ‘oh, look, they are just like me’.” (Climate Outreach, 2019) this only aids my point of how the most effective imagery for such purposes when published online or in paper form are the images that people relate too.

In some cases landscape photography can be one of the most useful tools to use when not only documenting but creating/raising awareness of the issues with our Anthropocene, it seems that unfortunately no matter how distressing and moving an image of a once breath-taking landscape may be, it will never have the same effect as that of an image of innocent animals that have been caught up in the crossfire of man kinds one sided war on the natural world, and the creatures that inhabit it. One example of this could be the photograph of oiled-covered pelicans by Daniel Beltrá, (winner of the 2011 Veolia Wildlife Photographer of the Year Award).

This image of the pelicans becomes far more haunting then Ed Burtynski’s images of oil spills as people see that the things that are occurring in different areas of the world not only have consequences but that they fall largely on innocent creatures that are not only living, but sentient and feeling beings. However, I found it interesting that when I paired the photograph with the above image of an oil spill by Burtynski, it shows a devastating chain of events allowing viewers to easily create a far more direct and powerful link between the oil spill and its consequences for the local wildlife.

Daniel Beltrá is a photographer who in his work captures the undeniable beauty and shocking vulnerability of the natural world in his imagery that is themed on and around natural landscapes and there wildlife. He is primarily a landscape photographer and is know to combine an painterly abstraction with the truly haunting details of an earth based paradise that we have as humans put in devastating peril. Belrà’s sweeping aerial landscape images are so effective as they allow the viewer to be invited to almost fly over breath-taking fields of ice, water and land, for not only to experience the natural wonders our planet holds, but to also become a witness to the scars and shocking scale of the environmental decline that’s visible in our Anthropocene. In his most famous wildlife images, Beltrá manages to capture the immediate and unforgiving trauma thats caused by oil spills, deforestation, desertification and of course climate change and tells the stories of the innocent creatures that unfortunately fall victims to those tragedies.

Over the past two decades, Beltrá’s work has taken him all over the globe with locations that spread across seven continents, including several expeditions to the Amazon, the Arctic, the Southern Oceans and the Patagonian ice fields. The devastating beauty he captures serves as a harsh yet hopeful reminder of our planet’s greatest treasures and there true natural beauty, as well as an urgent plea to protect them from further harm and for people to stand up and take action.

Photographer Kerstin Langenberger (a German photographer and conservationist) famously took a photo of a startlingly boney polar bear, one that sadly she thought was only a few days away from death due to its starvation. This image was then featured as a part of many online articles, debates and social media posts and was also splashed across the pages pf a number of papers on a global scale. Yet my question still is how can images such as these spark such an outcry from both the public and a number of professionals and public figures, but then a image of the ice caps melting in the exact same area as the bear can create no more than a small wave of sympathy among a selected group of people? Is this possibly down to the severity of the bears condition? When speaking about the creation of this now widely seen image Langenberger stated 'We didn't realize how thin it was until it stood up … It was totally clear to everybody that the bear would not survive more than a few more days,' (CBC, 2019)

This seems to be a pattern that’s visible in a number of photographs I have come across, but one of the key photos that shows this for me personally is conservationist photographer, Brent Stirtons heart breaking and eerie image of a rhino that’s been savagely attacked and killed by poachers for its horn in South Africa’s Hluhluwe Imfolozi Park. The image itself was taken as part of an undercover investigation into the illegal trade in rhino horns with Brent’s poignant image becoming symbolic of the devastating impact the demand for rhino horn is having on the species population with the number of them declining at a rate faster than they can recover. Black rhinos were once the more dominant of the rhino species due to the large number off them, however, it was estimated in 2015 that only 5,000 of them remained in the wild, a number that conservationists say has now fallen yet again to bellow 2500 due to the increased poaching that you see in his image. It was in 2007 when Brent entered and won the national geographic wildlife photography of the year with this image, during this time Lewis Blackwell (chair of the competitions jury stated ‘When an image shocks and assaults us, there needs to be good reason.

With this one, there is. The stark simplicity forces us to witness the brutal, tragic, stupid waste of a poacher’s work. If we feel disgust it is at our own species, while we pity the black bull rhino for its ghastly death, killed by two shots just so that its horn could be hacked off to supply illegal trade in a questionable “medicine”. There is a horrible intimacy to the photograph: it draws us in and invites us to explore our response and responsibility.’ (Nhm.ac.uk, 2019) This statement supports the idea that it is due to actually seeing death and pain from innocence animals that have caused no direct harm to us as humans, that triggers such strong emotions within audiences to take action, meaning the most impactful result of the photograph is an emotional response that an empty landscape could simply never achieve.

Yet it is not only animals that trigger this strong response and need to help and protect, we also show (if anything even more) empathy towards people in more unfortunate situations than ourselves, such as the work by renowned photographer Giden Mendel’s named “Drowning World”, in which he would travel to and photograph areas that had been hit with mass flooding due to global warming to try to raise awareness of the victims to the natural disasters and the conditions that have resulted from them and they were enduring and living with. When talking about this project Mendel states “In a flooded landscape, life is suddenly turned upside down and normality is suspended. With an almost ‘tracing paper’ effect on the societies in which they occur, flood waters often reveal underlying tensions and difficulties as they recede. It is these elements that continue to draw me to flood zones, evoking many questions about our sense of stability in the world.” (Mendel, 2019).

Mendel’s collection of photographs, that mainly consists of portraits of the victims, were extremely powerful, the way that Mendel positioned his subjects may be unorthodox to many a photographer but then so are the environments that they are surrounded by and as global warming continues to cause an ever increasing amount of extreme flooding across the world each year, the message his work presents continues to resonate with audiences today, if not even more so than they ever did before.

Overall when looking at the environmental issues within the Anthropocene it is important to see that in the long term these images do not really motivate people to believe in a better world. However, photography does provide endless opportunities to bridge the gap between the issues and the audience by allowing people to see the disastrous occurrences and events that are taking over our environment and then helping them on the way to being able to fully understand the impact that comes from them, whether the consequences directly impact audiences of not. From my research I have come to the conclusion that no matter how devastating a landscape is visually, as humans we will struggle to be empathetic to or have a strong emotional response to an image that consists of just a landscape alone.

However, when it is paired alongside or includes within itself a visual representation of the deadly side of environmental change that not only shows the destruction of a habitat but also some element of how it will affect the living, sentient, feeling beings with in it (regardless of their species.), audiences generally respond with much more passion and force, so maybe this is the way to go?