Nice images and moral imperatives
So - I did not get out to the bush the last week.
For those not in Australia, we've had record breaking rainfall and huge floods. While the area I was intending to visit isn't (and wasn't) flooded, the roads were wrecked. Specifically, I needed to drive my little car 80-90km down a dirt road which, after quite a lot of rain, was completely impassable.
That's ok - I'll be out there 12th-20th of November.
In the meantime I read a pretty interesting book Against the Anthropocene. This is a book all about the ways that human-led environmental destruction and resistance are represented visually. It's not usually the sort of thing I'd read but I'm glad I did.
A key argument in this book is that photographs of environmental destruction are often very pretty. This emphasises the scale and 'wow' factor of the image, and often robs it of the awfulness and disgust we might feel on the ground.
You can certainly see some of that in the work of someone like Edmund Burtynsky whose love of aerial photographs often shows an abstraction, as well as this really impressive sense of scale. Similarly, Mustafah Abdulaziz's long project on water is a 'greatest hits' of photographic compositions that all look gorgeous but, at the end of the day, muddy the waters (ha) of what he's trying to show: that water ownership, use and misuse is rife and alarming.
In these cases, and many more, the challenge the key question the author is asking is: why make beautiful pictures about ugly and terrifying things? Doesn't that end up unwittingly advocating for projects like what you're critical of?
I think the strongest point was made linking photographs of mining operations (which often try to show audiences the vast scale of the operation) with advocacy for geoengineering (and, I don't know what you think, but all the geoengineering I've seem is a tremendous failure, Australia's full of them). T J Demos, who wrote the book, argues that visually representing these things in a grand and majestic way only inspires further hope in poorly conceived, likely-to-fail geoengineering and not the disgust or sadness that might prompt more people to demand mining stop.
I found his central point: that showing something in a beautiful way undercuts the moral point really persuasive. But the question is 'ok, then what?'.
In my own work, I'm photographing ecology, biodiversity loss, failed farming, fencing projects and land degradation. It's difficult to think about how to make these ugly.
In the case of a failed farm, the cleared land and solitary dead trees are often really evocative and have a really lovely minimalism to them. That surface masks that these are man made tragedies.
In the case of ecology, the abundance and human-led regeneration is exciting and beautiful yet that masks that these activities are really rare, and complex in their own ways.
In the case of fencing, it's so mundane and that boredom masks that these large fences can completely ruin landscapes.
As artists, we're used to trying to make things look good. We want, I think, even when showing something bad, to craft it to appear technically effective. Perhaps we should try to do both. If you take Guernica it's both quite visually stunning but also really deeply troubling and sad. Mishka Henner's Feedlots (satellite images of huge cattle feeding lots in the USA) they are both visually arresting and just gross.
Realistically, I think we're at a point where we cannot ignore moral imperatives to leave it better than we found it. I'm not sure we've ever been in a time where morals shouldn't have mattered, but it's clear for a long time the longer term was completely ignored. So, to me, it's essential that we, even when making our art, think 'is this doing something good?'.