#glacialmelt

Glacial melt

On the 2009 roadtrip we drove and  walked to an iconic tourist site: the face of the  Fox Glacier/Te Moeka o Tuawe in Westland’s Tai Poutini National Park.  Despite the glacier’s  advance between 1985 and 2009 I was stunned by the extent of its  historical  retreat from the late 1960s when I visited it before leaving Christchurch to work in Wellington.  With glacial melt and oceanic thermal expansion, our planetary future is becoming more oceanic. 

This was the moment when I started  to think about global warming in  the Anthropocene. Thee media were referring to glacial melting, rising sea-levels, increasingly violent storms— hurricanes, tornadoes, typhoons, floods--- forest fires in Australia and California and mega droughts.   Polar bears are endangered by the melting of the ice floes on which their survival depends.  Scientists predict that by the end of our century over half the world’s species will have vanished in the sixth great extinction. This one, however, will not be  caused by asteroid-impact like the one that triggered the fifth great extinction at the end of the Cretaceous period, but by clever human beings, homo sapiens.

Making photographs  in and about the Anthropocene? I had no idea what this meant photographically speaking. It was  just too complex. even  though  photography was  entangled in the experience of  living within the ongoing mutations of a damaged world.

The question was posed: what does it mean for photography to encounter the Anthropocene? Another question quickly followed:  how can travel photography do this when the Anthropocene is usually  framed through such modes of the visual as data visualization, satellite imagery and climate models of the whole earth? How can we visualize climate heating beyond the  images of stranded polar bears on ice floes, or Pacific Islanders wading through flooded villages?

The  conversation about climate change, which   has been dominated by the geophysical and natural sciences, has seen the emergence of climate determinism. This is  a scientific trend that extracts climate from a myriad of variable factors to predict migration, economics, disease, state infrastructural collapse, civil war, and other calamities without engaging other disciplines or studies, say for instance the humanities and social sciences.

Rolleiflex TLR, Zeiss 75mm Planar f.2.8,  Kodak Portra 400ASA, handheld