Looking at emergency times

Since its earliest days, photography has looked at how people have changed their surroundings – for better, for worse; in sensitive and gradual ways, or with drastic and often damaging rapidity. Surveying the environment is not new. What is new now, however, is the scale and significance of the changes involved – we are living in emergency times. Also new is the recognition, based on increasingly authoritative evidence, of a unique and terrifying development in Earth's recent history – the potentially catastrophic disruption by human activity of the Earth's essential and interconnected operating systems – the way the world works. This book looks at a variety of art-photographic practices that portray this accelerating development, and how it may be adapted to or resisted.

But before looking at how artist-photographers have been responding to these issues, it may be useful to consider some of the current science – and also some of the commentary from a range of viewpoints across several disciplines – involved in recognizing what is happening, and assessing its significance. The first half of this introductory essay attempts a brief summary of these topics. The second half discusses a representative selection of current and recent photographic practices in relation to surveying the Anthropocene.

The work of artist-photographers need not, of course, be informed by scientific data; many artists travel by that alternative route, ‘the road from the eye to the heart that does not go through the intellect’3. But all artists live in the world like everyone else, and what they perceive and make is influenced, at least, by available information, and is increasingly being driven by the concerns identified by scientific, environmentalist and environmental-justice observers regarding the current state of the Earth, its inhabitants and their environments.

Many of these concerns are familiar ones. In the past, however – at times when the effects of disruptive human activity were less deep and globally pervasive – many of them were perceived intuitively as premonitions, and were articulated differently. But these responses have sometimes been precursors of today's ongoing activism. In the early nineteenth century, for example – around the time of the invention of photography – a conjunction of ideas and concerns occurred across the arts, the humanities and the sciences, involving the functioning of environmental interconnections and human social systems, and their disruption by the rise of industrial activity in the ‘First Industrial Revolution’.