This exhibition featured the
shortlisted photographs from the 10.000 images submitted for the 2015 Atkins
CIWEM Environmental Photographer of the Year competition. The competition
encourages participants from around the world to “share their images of environmental issues to
encourage our awareness and understanding of the causes, consequences and
solutions to climate change and social inequality”. Whilst largely
concentrating on human issues, such as poverty, culture, population growth and
human rights, environmental issues such as biodiversity were also covered.
My interest in this competition
was threefold: to observe how winning entrants in the portfolio competitions
presented their selections of photographs, to understand better how some of the
drier subject areas could be given aesthetic photographic appeal and to study
how photographers dealt with wildlife-related issues such as biodiversity (a
subject of particular interest to me).
The exhibition was visually
stunning: beautiful photographs highlighting important environmental issues.
Most of the portfolios, in particular, had been taken by professional
photo-journalists. I envied them their opportunities to travel to spectacular
places in order to highlight important environmental issues. Having said that,
having recently returned from Vietnam with around 2500 images I have nothing
that remotely compares with Ly Hoang Long’s beautiful night-time image of
fishing net checking there (Image 1)!
Image 1 (Ly Hoang
Long)
Some familiar themes were
highlighted, such as the growing accumulation of (mainly) plastic waste in our
oceans and on land and the shortage of (clean) water in many parts of the
world. Burtynsky’s epic photographs of the massive ship-breaking yards in
Bangladesh have encouraged many other photographers to visit the Chittagong
area and some beautiful images have emerged, with Michael Blach’s photograph
(Image 2) being my favourite from the exhibition. Work in these yards is fraught
with danger and many deaths have resulted: Bangladesh appears to be one of very
few countries that are prepared to take on the task of breaking up massive
container vessels and dealing (or not) with the resultant environmental legacy.
Image 2 (Michael
Blach)
The exhibition was quite small and
easy to negotiate in under an hour. It was also very popular: when we visited
(admittedly on a Saturday), the crowds were such that it was difficult to get
close enough to the photographs to read the accompanying texts or fully
appreciate their impacts.
The photographs in this
exhibition resemble those one might expect to find in an issue of “National
Geographic” magazine. They are beautiful to look at, as well as highlighting
the many environmental problems that the planet and its people face. But will
they have any impact on dealing with those problems, and does this matter for a
visual arts exhibition? These are the issues that I find hard to come to terms
with. As a former scientist I have spent much of my life tackling problems and
trying (usually unsuccessfully) to come up with solutions in order to make the
world a better place. Using photography as a documentary tool to record and
highlight social and environmental issues is an area that I am particularly
interested in and to see how other photographers have managed this in a
creative and aesthetically pleasing manner is inspirational. However, do these
images represent photographic art? The photographs of Daniel Beltra, discussed
in my critical essay, occupy the same area of documentary / photojournalism.
Beltra is a photojournalist (or so I’m told) and his work is commission- rather
than concept-driven. Nevertheless I
would argue that he and many of the photographers whose works feature in this
exhibition are artists and that their work holds far more relevance for us in
our daily lives than does that of photographers whose work is entirely
concept-driven.
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