Visualising the Invisible
How 5 photographers are showing the impacts of decades of global warming
In just 120 years, the earth’s temperature has risen by 1.4°C. Much of the consequences are so subtle that they are invisible to the naked eye. To document the changes happening over a long period of time, photographers whose medium usually captures a single moment in time, have to get creative.
Perched atop a pylon set in the rock overlooking the Columbia Glacier in Alaska, a member of the Extreme Ice Survey team checked the status of the camera installed eight years prior. The device is part of an arsenal of forty-one Nikon D200s that monitored the movements of twenty-four glaciers around the world. “These ice behemoths are to the climate what canaries are to coal mines; they announce the perils ahead,” says James Balog, the photographer behind the project. Looking through his archives of images of the Arctic in 2006, he noticed an alarming trend: the snowy landscapes of yesterday were not so vast.
“I first thought about going back to some of these sites, once a year, to prove that they were changing. But glaciers are moving at a much faster pace. They are very sensitive and react daily to the climate around them,” he adds. In lieu, the mountaineer spent six months building and testing shooting systems that can withstand the cold for long periods of time. The batteries are recharged using solar panels. The trigger is activated at regular intervals by an integrated computer designed specifically for this mission. The whole system, which weighs more than 45 kilos, is then transported for several days across the snowy plains by boat, dogsled, on foot, on skis or by helicopter. Once there, it is secured in place thanks to a set of fasteners and shrouds. The initiative was as ambitious as it is crucial.
“How does one remain indifferent when one sees, thanks to the time-lapse prepared with the help of the collected images, the Solheimajokull Glacier in Iceland deflate before our eyes?,” asks Balog.
Project Pressure adopted another strategy to create, collect and disseminate information on the vanishing glaciers. On the one hand, renown artists were asked to create work that would raise awareness and inspire action. And, on the other hand, images of glaciers are being crowd-sourced and added to a survey map. Peter Funch and Simon Norfolk, two photographers involved in this initiative, both believe that there’s nothing like showing the before and after to alert public opinion. But how to do so when the before was more than a century ago?
Peter Funch collects old postcards of tourist sites, which he then visits to recreate the same panoramas. Using a medium format Hasselblad, he takes three exposures every few minutes, each with a filter that is sensitive to a particular tone — red, blue or green. Combined, these negatives produce colorful prints where everything is not perfectly aligned. This, he hopes, evokes the passing of time and the gradual erosion of the different layers of snow. While his colleague Simon Norfolk, using topographic surveys from the 1930s, traced the contours of the former edges of the Lewis Glacier on Mount Kenya with a homemade broom-torch. The ice sheet has lost 90% of its mass since 1934. The camera, whose shutter is left open all the time, records the path of the flame.
Daesung Lee adopted a similar before-and-after approach to demonstrate the consequences of climate change on the Mongolian lands. Between 1970 and 2007, 887 rivers, 2096 streams and 1166 lakes have dried up. He began by photographing areas that are still green and produced 3m x 5m prints of these images. He then transported these to places where grass has given way to sand. With the help of nomads who sought refuge in the capital of Ulaanbaatar as their lands became arid, he recreated scenes from the past, much like the dioramas exhibited in natural history museums. “I emphasize both a past that no longer is and the current reality. Most reports show only the effects of global warming and of the exploitation of natural resources. It’s thus difficult for the audience to imagine what’s been lost. By having both in the same picture, the message is stronger, clearer, “ explains the Korean photographer.
That said, comparative approaches can at times fall short, or so believes Camille Seaman. “There are so many pictures that are technically perfect, but have no souls. Until now, we’ve mostly seen apocalyptic stories,” she remarks. With this in mind, she composed a visual ode to nature in the Arctic region. Her grandfather, a member of the Shinnecock tribe, would introduce every tree as if it were a member of her family, just like her cousins or her parents. Today, when she sees an iceberg in the middle of the water, it’s as if one of her own floated out to sea. She works instinctively, pressing the shutter when she is overwhelmed by emotion. “My images are meant to be a space where people can feel what I have when I was standing on the ice floe, a small creature amidst a majestic landscape.”
At a time when the consequences of climate change are increasingly dire, the visual challenge these photographers have taken on — in the words of Peter Funch to “communicate the often dry findings of scientists, in a more poetic manner”– is a crucial one to resolve. If seeing is believing (see J.R. McConvey’s discussion of Daniel Pauly’s Shifting Baseline Syndrome), then comparative works can go a long way in showing us what once was. The next step then becomes demonstrating why we ought to care and what we can do to alter our current course.
*This article is adapted from La terre mise en examen par les photographes initially published in Polka Magazine #32
