Surveying the anthropocene : environment and photography now / edited by Patricia Macdonald ; with essays by Patricia Macdonald [and thirteen others] ; and commentary by the artist-photographer contributors, and Willis Hartshorn [and ten others].
Section 1: Into the Anthropocene -- Surveying the Anthropocene: Environment and photography now / Patricia Macdonald -- Generation Anthropocene: how humans have altered the planet forever / Robert Macfarlane -- Section 2: Anthroposcenes -- Human marks -- Marked land -- Habitat destruction: the ecological crisis -- Extraction: minerals and carbon: oil -- Pollution: carbon: particulates and air quality; marine plastic; ingested plastic -- Environmental destruction, political power, and self-promotion in the arts / Owen Logan -- Environmental justice: resources; confrontation of cultures -- Environmental consciousness: between worlds and times; contemplating global crisis -- Nuclear: 'stagings' and photo/performance works -- Chernobyl revisited: Marie Curie's fingerprint: Nuclear spelunking in the Chernobyl Zone: the images of Aleksandr Kupny / Kate Brown -- Ruin lust/Ruin porn?: What 'ruin porn' tells us about ruins - and porn / Siobhan Lyons -- Section 3: Climate Change -- 'A cat in hell's chance': why we're losing the battle to keep global warming below 2C / Andrew Simms -- Climate change: ice -- Climate change: flood -- Section 4: ‘Wild’/’Unwild’/’Rewild’ and Rephotography -- Walk on the wild side: Rewilding, hillwalking & history / George Monbiot and Dan Bailey -- Natural processes; Wildness; 'Wild land' -- Not so wild? - human cultural traces -- Rephotography: an ecologist's archive; habitat destruction; natural regeneration and rewilding -- Survival/Extinction: survivor species; vulnerable species; endangered species -- Section 5: After the Anthropocene -- Imagined future biologies: plastic; jellyfish -- Edenic apocalypse meets gardens against Eden / Natasha Myers and Ayelen Liberona -- Lessons from a pandemic / Jared Diamond -- What coronavirus can teach us about climate change / Leslie Hook -- After the Anthropocene: Seabirds and the oceanic images of J.J. Harrison.
Summary:
"Surveying the Anthropocene collates a range of approaches to image making concerning environmental issues by some of the best artist-photographers working worldwide. The incisive input to environmental questions is gathered together at a pivotal moment in the evolving human relationship with our home planet. Photographic approaches to environmental imagery have altered fundamentally in recent decades, largely as a result of increasing socio-ecological awareness. This insightful international survey, with a strong representation from Scotland, considers the varied range of current working practices of a representative selection of artist-photographers, both renowned and emerging, whose image-making explores human-caused environmental change. It concentrates particularly on work which relates to the types of impact, on climate and the web of life, that are sufficiently significant and globally widespread to appear in the future record of the rocks as a new geological epoch – the Anthropocene. The concept of the Anthropocene has engaged the attention and imagination of a wide range of commentators from very different backgrounds and walks of life. It therefore provides an excellent context in which to discuss, in an open and cross-disciplinary way, the range of responses of artist-photographers and cultural writers to our present global situation of multiple, interconnected environmental and social crises – and the options for human ingenuity in addressing these."--Publisher description.
This resource is supported by the Institute of Museum and Library Services under the provisions of the Library Services and Technology Act as administered by State Library of Iowa.