Visualizing the Environment: American Landscape Photography from Ansel Adams to Dawoud Bey

American landscape photographer Ansel Adams (1902–1984) described his approach to picture-making as one of “visualization" – the photographic expression of what the environment looks and feels like to the artist. “The first step towards visualization, and hence toward expressive interpretation,” Adams said, “is to become aware of the world around us in terms of the photographic image. We must teach our eyes to become more perceptive.” 

Adams’s description of his creative process serves as the point of departure for this presentation, which explores the many ways that photographers have visualized the American environment. It begins with Ansel Adams, whose photographs of pristine nature – all pictured in razor-sharp focus, with subtle gradations of light and dark, and deep recessions of space – remain some of the most immediately recognizable environmental images of our time. His photographs have inspired environmental consciousness for many, but they have also drawn criticism what he left out of his visualizations: the impact of humans on the natural environment.

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Tales of Two Islands: Landscapes, Gardens and Weather in Joy Gregory and Philip Miller’s Seeds of Empire (2021) Project

British photographer Joy Gregory and South African composer Philip Miller’s exhibition Seeds of Empire: A Little or No Breeze (2021) was a very personal, research-based body of work, shown at Empire House, a Georgian townhouse in Lambeth, London (UK). The collaborative works explore and experiment with the representation of an enslaved Black individual named Rose, by taking up natural scientist Hans Sloane’s medical and weather observations from 1687 to 1689 and published in his A Voyage to . . . Jamaica. The artworks combine effects of coloniality and forms of plant knowledge, gardens and landscape of the Caribbean with contemporary Jamaicans’ testimonies on migration to the United Kingdom.

The contemporary works challenge historic English-centric prospecting vision of landscape and the material-visual culture in economic botany collections such as those at the Royal Botanical Gardens at Kew in London. They constitute but one example of industrial processes whose long-term effects resonate and are witnessed in the present day.
The Anthropocene, specifically Black Anthropocenes, critically frame these events. The artists’ engagement with historic sources that originate in the plantation system and its inherent violence, turn to becoming British in the present however by re-performing the past, thereby shaping a long history from the sixteenth century onwards.
 

Tracing Migration Routes: Bouchra Khalili’s Environmental Photography and Multimedia Mapping

In her 2012 “The Wet Feet Series,” created against the backdrop of Floridian nature, French-Moroccan photographer and multimedia artist Bouchra Khalili focuses on the traces left by migrants from Latin America and the Caribbean onto concrete objects placed in (urban) nature—stranded boats, makeshift floats, and rusted containers along the Miami River. Her environmental photographs are based on the “wet foot, dry foot” policy, which allowed Cuban immigrants who reached the U.S. shore to stay, but promptly rejected those who were intercepted in national waters. This paper explores how Khalili’s photographs mark the transitory time between stasis and mobility, while taking into account the parallels drawn between trade routes and bodies, and the scars left by the migratory experience. I contrast her photography with the “The Mapping Journey Project” (2008-2011), which was created via collaborative storytelling with refugees and prominently exhibited at the 2024 Venice Biennale “Strangers Everywhere.” In an 8-channel video installation of static shots, refugees here draw their circuitous migration routes with a black permanent marker on maps, metonymically inscribing their bodies onto the environment. Carving out landscapes of global migration, they draw alternative maps of the Mediterranean and inscribe their circuitous forced journeys of loss and unrooting onto what become (geo)graphic abstractions. I show how they hereby offer their personal and civic narratives as acts of defiance if not resistance, allowing Khalili’s audience to understand the tracing of migration routes as a new way of environmental storytelling in visual media.

Albert Renger-Patzsch: Ruhrgebietslandschaften

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On the Edges of the Documentary: Aesthetics and Politics of the Waste Land in Contemporary Environmental Photography

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The Park and the Circus Train: Amusement and Environment in Photography

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Framing Resistance: The Role of Activism in Environmental Photograph

Photography first emerged as a tool for documenting environmental despoliation in 19th-century California, when it was used as legal evidence to protest against the harmful effects of hydraulic mining. Since then, the medium has played a crucial role in exposing various forms of environmental degradation, from early portrayals of pollution in the Great Lakes during the 1960s, to more recent examples of artists who highlight the extent of our current global ecological crisis. Today, photography is often integrated into multimodal presentations, which combine visual imagery with scientific data and personal testimonies, creating powerful narratives that deepen public understanding of complex environmental issues. By outlining the scope of activism in praxis, this paper will examine how environmental photography can help to mobilise public opinion, and contribute to a groundswell of resistance in communities that have been adversely affected by industrial pollution. 

How to Forget Nature: The Photography of Stephen Shore

This talk—drawn from my current book project, How and Why to Look at Art in the Time of Climate Change—considers how various images of the American West promote different concepts of nature. The talk begins with now-iconic photographs made by Ansel Adams in the 1940s—gorgeous images that, while promoting respect for the landscape, also reinforce the dangerous notion that true nature is devoid of (even the opposite of) human beings. We will then look at art that, by contrast, helps us sense how human beings depend upon and form part of the natural world, focusing on Stephen Shore’s wry roadside photographs of the 1970s—pictures that dwell on correspondences between the human and nonhuman realms. Through close looking, the talk argues that our received idea of nature now undermines sustainability, and it concludes by proposing a radical redefinition of the concept.