viz. - environment

Interview with Photographer Maureen R. Drennan

noelradley — Tue, 09 Feb 2010 17:10:27 +0000

Image credit: From Maureen R. Drennan
H/T to Artist as Citizen Burning Embers Competition

On the Viz. blog September 2009, I discussed Maureen R. Drennan’s photo series "Thin Ice," where Drennan proposes the potential losses to ice fishing with global warming. I recently had an interview with Drennan about "Thin Ice" and being a finalist on the New York Times DotEarth blog/Artist as Citizen Burning Embers Competition. We discussed remote places, the scale of her project, the themes and the arguments of the photos, as well as the intersections of photography and story.

“A small story about a greater problem”: Interview with Maureen R. Drennan

Viz.: I was talking to a colleague about your series of photos. She said that when she thinks about visual rhetoric and the environment, she thinks of Al Gore’s “An Inconvenient Truth.” She was struck by the contrast between “An Inconvenient Truth” as a visual rhetoric piece and what your series of photos are doing.

Drennan: With Al Gore’s movie, he was really trying to hammer home this situation that is imminent, and I think he’s trying to reach as many people as possible. I think it was done very successfully. It was done in a way where a lot of people could understand it. It was accessible, and it was also dynamic and intense. I know my work is not like that. I wouldn’t know how to go about doing that. That would be for a different photographer…I’m not a scientist. I don’t claim to be an expert.

Viz.: How do you think your photos compare to the other visualizations of climate change?

Drennan: I hope this doesn’t come across as self-deprecating. I think [my images] were a little more subtle. It’s not super dynamic, but I think that’s okay. It’s a small story that I think can relate to the big picture. We’re all involved in small stories. It’s what we’re involved in every day. It makes up the big picture. I think other visualizations of climate change are grand and monumental. My pictures aren’t like that. They’re a lot more quiet.

Viz.: Can you describe how you began to take these pictures of ice fishing?

Drennan: I’m from Manhattan, born and raised here in New York. I’m really drawn to remote, beautiful places because it’s so different from what I’m accustomed to. My husband Paul is from Rice Lake, Wisconsin, which is a very small town in northern Wisconsin. When we would go visit his in-laws, I usually wander around and take pictures of the area. I was just really drawn to these beautiful, remote lakes, and the fact that there are these little shacks on the lake. [For people who aren’t from a cold climate, ice-fishing] is sort of a foreign thing. I was really drawn to it…What are they doing out there? Why are there these little houses out there on the lake? I just instinctually wandered out there and started chatting with people and taking their picture and taking photographs of the landscape and the ice shacks.

What was initially so interesting was the community and how tight knit they are: these temporary communities out on the ice. They only last a few months, and people bond. They become so close. It’s like having a cabin in the summer at the lake. It’s a little place—a little refuge that you go to—and you’re friends with the neighbors. You also (for safety reasons) have to be looking out for one another. Even though it’s an isolated activity, there’s also a community aspect.

Viz.: How did your photos become part of the Artist as Citizen project?

Drennan: Even just in the two years that I have been doing this, the season got a little bit shorter. The ice shacks went out later in the winter and came back earlier. It’s way below zero—like 10 degrees below zero and 20 degrees below when the wind picks up—so I spend a lot of time in the shacks talking to people. In talking to people this past winter, people [would say] how the season is changing and the ice is changing…That’s anecdotal. I don’t think [the ice fishers are] studying charts and graphs, but it was interesting to hear. It just got me thinking about these lovely communities and how this is a small story about a greater problem.

For the full interview, click here.

Science Art, Part Two: Biology of the Strange

emcg — Thu, 08 Oct 2009 15:22:57 +0000

Image Credit: Ernst Haeckel

H/T: Slate

In the viz. archive, Dale quotes a 1979 interview with German filmmaker Werner Herzog, in which he insists that "if we do not find adequate images and an adequate language for our civilization with which to express them, we will die out like the dinosaurs." Re-watching Herzog’s 2007 documentary Encounters at the End of the World, which offers a strangely beautiful vision of Antarctica, I was reminded of the late-19th-century scientific drawings by German zoologist Ernst Haeckel. Both give us “new images” of the natural world through a complex mode of artistic, mystical, and scientific vision, generating what I’ll call a visual biology of the strange.

For Haeckel, stylized drawings like the radiolaria array above would help naturalists see the unity of life (and its common descent). However, both his contemporaries and modern scientists have questioned the accuracy of these illustrations, their fidelity to the specimens he collected. Despite their problematic status as scientific illustration, these images make visible an eerie vitality that connects organic life. Their artistry invokes a feeling in the viewer akin to a science-fictional alterity: these images are both familiar and strange, hence their power to alter our vision.

Image Credit: Ernst Haeckel

H/T: Slate

Similarly, Herzog’s Encounters defies existing schemes of classification. Critics have pointed to its oddball poetry, its mystical vision; in particular, it’s been understood in terms of the “absurd quest” trope that dominates Herzog’s oeuvre, including his previous documentary Grizzly Man. But its quirkiness perhaps obscures its achievement: Encounters re-envisions the nature film.

Instead of “fluffy penguins,” the camera lingers on a disoriented, perhaps “deranged,” lone penguin as it follows a determined path into the interior, toward “certain death.” The underwater footage, set to majestic but slightly dissonant choral music, takes on an element of danger, even fear, when juxtaposed with researcher Sam Bowser’s science-fictional descriptions of this “horribly violent world,” with “worm-type things with horrible mandibles” that drove our ancestors to flee in terror to the land.

Image Credit: Encounters at the End of the World

The film also insists on human subjects and interventions as part of the Antarctic landscape: the camera turns with equal curiosity to the continent’s temporary human inhabitants and to the “bleak Motel 6 drabness” of McMurdo Research Base. Instead of the researcher as talking head, we see the nutritional ecologists who study the feeding patterns of Weddell seals enact a performance-art piece: they slowly crouch down to listen to the ice above the Ross Sea, accompanied by the “inorganic,” Pink-Floyd-like sounds of underwater seal recordings.

At the risk of mere gushy praise versus cool intellectual distance: I confess that I left the film with a sense of gratitude for its vision of scientific inquiry as deeply motivated by aesthetic appreciation and even mystical yearnings--from the glaciologist who dreams that he hears the cry of the iceberg B15 to the physicist who describes his investigations of the neutrino as an attempt to contact “some spirit or god” inhabiting a separate universe.

The apocalyptic resonance of the film's title points, ultimately, to the urgent need for "new images" of science. To reiterate the sentiments of last week's post, perhaps environmental activism must begin not with cliched images of cuddly, distressed polar bears trapped on ice floes, but with visions of wonder, with a sense of mysterious beauty, with the biology of the strange exemplified by Haeckel's studies of organic forms and Herzog's Encounters.

Science Art, Part One

emcg — Thu, 01 Oct 2009 16:22:10 +0000

Image credit: The IFF by Alyssa Gorelick. H/T to io9

Noel’s last post, in which she calls for “incisive, creative visualizations of ecological crisis," got me thinking about two recent, ongoing art projects that engage with the challenge of visualizing Eco-Perils: namely, the loss of biodiversity and the dying coral reefs. Ultimately, they suggest that our failure of vision, our inability to see ecological danger, is intimately linked with a failure of scientific understanding.

In her NOVA series, Isabella Kirkland creates life-size paintings of species that have been discovered within the last twenty years. NOVA: Understory (2007), below, juxtaposes species found across several continents. The lush but also crowded, feverish landscape suggests their impending extinction due to changing environmental conditions or shrinking habitats. As Jessica Palmer notes, these paintings recall 17th- and 18th-century cabinets of curiosities, though the logic of this tableaux reveals not a common taxonomic order but a shared “ecological plight.” While invoking a sense of the beauty and wonder of biodiversity, the series also points to the fragility of this state of profusion, the possibility that an abundance of forms will be replaced by a monochromatic landscape populated by what David Quammen calls “superweeds,” invasive species like roaches, rats, and humans.

Image credit: Isabella Kirkland. H/T to Seed Magazine

“Hyperbolic crochet” combines advanced geometry and feminist handicraft in the service of making visible the disappearing Great Barrier Reef, as project co-founder and historian of science Margaret Wertheim explains in this intriguing TED talk. Through its use of crochet, the coral-reef project gives the utter strangeness, alienness of marine life a kind of homespun intimacy.

The convergence of disciplines at play in this project is intoxicating, but I wonder: what work does it do? Will the reefs live on only in these cuddly, crocheted instantiations? Similarly, despite the vital and vibrant beauty of Kirkland’s paintings, are they ultimately a kind of memento mori for species on the verge of extinction—i.e., art-as-taxidermy?

Less pessimistically: perhaps these projects function rhetorically less as a call to activism than as an argument for a particular way of looking at the natural world, a crucial (if less dramatic) step toward environmental change. In Origin of Species, Darwin connects understanding with vision: “Nature may be said to have taken pains to reveal…her scheme of modification, which it seems that we wilfully will not understand.” These artworks make visible the reality of a “web of complex relations" (quoting Darwin again) that we willfully will not see.

Visualizing 'Green'

noelradley — Mon, 21 Sep 2009 14:18:25 +0000

Image credit: From Maureen R. Drennan
H/T to Artist as Citizen Burning Embers Competition

This series of photos by Maureen Drennan resonates with the way I have been thinking about environmental activism. The photographs tell a story of ice-fishing communities in Northern Wisconsin and Minnesota and depict ordinary ice-fishers: bright-eyed children over plastic gallon fishing buckets, seasoned fishers in pullovers and camouflage, and bright cabins in contrast to the winter white. There are also pictures of cracks in the ice.

As the photographer writes, ice fishing is decreasing with global warning, which impacts sub-cultures of fishers, losses of community as well as economic losses.

Recently, I have been thinking we need incisive, creative visualizations of ecological crisis. Mainstream ‘green’ imagery seems (to me, lately) way too benign. Do swirling, interconnected arrows really cause people to recycle? Do they have a limited function? Are muted greens and browns the right palate for motivating owners of industrial companies across the world, who need to decrease polluting?

On DotEarth, the New York Times environmental blogger Andrew C. Revkin is promoting ideas that relate to mine. This month Revkin features the work of four designers, Drennan’s photos and three other visualizations about ecological crisis from the Art as Citizen/DotEarth project Burning Embers Competition. Revkin not only featured the artist/designers, for he also inspired the project with a proposal for illustrations about climate risk in an earlier post. It is interesting that Revkin's proposal was answered, and it is also interesting the kinds of images created.

Drennan’s photos were quite different from a chart, or a visualization based on numerical data. She measures climate risk against some other kind of scale. Her images of people in their threatened environment point out the interpersonal connections and practices that will be lost with global warming. Is this a more effective picture? What are the audience for Drennan’s as opposed to the other images? Look for an interview with Drennan on Viz. in the coming weeks.