Environmental photography

Environmental photography co-evolved with the ecology movement. Interestingly, both began with a single photograph. On Christmas Eve 1968 the cosmonaut Bill Anders stepped out of Apollo 8 onto the moon's surface and took what's been described as "the most influential environmental photograph ever taken." The photograph entitled "Earthrise" became emblematic of our shared destiny and, by extension, the need for our shared stewardship of the planet.

From this seminal moment we have to consider three distinct approaches to the genre. The first is an emphatically ecocentric, occasionally misanthropic, approach to the nature/society interface traceable to the photographs and feisty polemicism of Ansel Adams. Adams used images successfully to persuade the US Congress, back in the 1930s, to create wilderness sanctuaries in the American West. King's River Canyon is an example.

Photography's role in championing ecological awareness is evident today in the work of National Geographic editor-at-large, Michael 'Nick' Nichols. In 1999, together with scientist Michael Fay, Nichols pushed the government of Gabon to create national parks to protect the forests he had photographed during a 2000 mile "megatransect" across Africa. The role of people was also well documented. In Brutal Kinship Nichols teamed up with Jane Goodall to explore the close links between chimpanzees and humans.

A more journalistic approach to campaigning with photography is found in Brent Stirton's award-winning story on murdered mountain gorillas in the Congo, published first in Newsweek, or Greenpeace's photographs of their own efforts to stop Japanese whaling in the Southern Ocean.

A second approach to environmental photography is more anthropocentric, sympathetic to human vulnerability and the environment in the face of outside pressure. Examples in the history of photography must surely be the work of Eugene Smith in this photo-documentary Minamata on the outbreak of mercury poisoning in Japan during the 1950s, or Philip Jones Griffiths' shocking account of Agent Orange, the carcinogenic dioxin-based defoliant used by the US in the Vietnam War.

© Alessandra Sanguinetti/Magnum Photos

In recent years a third approach to environmental photography has emerged - a 'cultural turn' where the nature/society interface is interrogated subjectively by the photographer but without the aim of didactic evangelism. The messages are there but they have to be teased out or intuited emotionally. Last year the International Center for Photography in New York put together an exhibition called "Ecotopia" in an attempt to come to terms with this approach. Alessandra Sanguinetti's work on farm animals was included, the equally evocative work on the landscape of mining by Raymond Meeks was not.

My own approach to environmental photography falls within this third approach. In the 1990s I documented our (human) aesthetic and instrumental relationship to trees in about 40 countries (The Time of Trees, 1999). I could not disassociate myself from the human perspective. Similarly, in Footprint: Our landscape in flux (Thames & Hudson, forthcoming) my photographs explore the human impact on the European landscape. My view is that because I am not looking for stock images of environmental destruction but images of landscape that are quietly disturbing, this approach may be more affective in getting people to question what's happening out there, and what's changing.

Change - the whole temporal dimension - is central to environmental photography, and virtually absent from nature photography. This is especially significant when we come to look at tropical forests where we are experiencing the earth's sixth major extinction event (the last took place 65 million years ago and wiped out the dinosaurs).

The sad fact is that cutting down any 10 hectare block of rainforest in Borneo, Sumatra, Papua New Guinea, Madagascar or Brazil means the loss of a considerable number of species that can never be replaced. It is not easy to understand this but in many tropical rainforests virtually every adjacent tree is an example of a different species often unrepeated in the forest matrix.

Diversity does not correlate with abundance, just with diversity. Madagascar has only been colonised by humans for 1500 years. Until the 1950s there were 12,000 plant species and around 190,000 animal species - most of them endemic. Over a short period of time 85% of the tropical forest has been destroyed, mostly by fire, to make room for a burgeoning population and more than half the original species - that exist nowhere else on earth - have disappeared.

What survives is a thin band of rainforest in the east, south of the capital and a threatened "spiny forest" in the dry south. The current population of Madagascar is 19.6 million - about 30% illiterate. The projected population for 2050 is 43.5 million. It's hardly the fault of this growing population that they are not aware of what it is they are at risk of losing: no one has set up effective education programmes to inform them. The literacy problem is even worse in Papua New Guinea, another important centre of biodiversity, where 49% of women are illiterate.

© Stuart Franklin/Magnum Photos

If we say we want to conserve tropical forests for their species diversity, as a carbon sink, for the oxygen or fresh water they generate, as a source of cures for childhood diseases (such as leukaemia - cured after finding the rose periwinkle in Madagascar), or the chance for future generations to enjoy the forests, none of the important ones should be cut at all. However, because it's the world's resource managers who would present such a case for sustainability to the people of, say, Madagascar, those managers have to come up with an alternative means of compensation. Or, as happened in Sumatra, they have to lease forests for the benefit of future generations.

Sustainability of species diversity in tropical rainforests needs a negotiated settlement between a global fund set up to protect them and the governments under whose sovereignty they lie. A portion of that fund would be well spent on education. But what can photography do to focus attention on disappearing forests as they come under even more pressure from loggers and biofuel demands?

The Sony World Photography Awards, linked to the Prince's Rainforests Project, provides a huge opportunity for photography and photographers to make an impact in the struggle to save what's left of the worlds rainforests and the livelihoods of forest people. Environmentalism has a distinguished history of individuals who have stood up and made a difference, often, as in the case of Rachel Carson, without a camera. Here is photography's chance.

Links
» Sony World Photography Awards
» Stuart Franklin's Magnum Portfolio
» Stuart Franklin's Books (in the Magnum Store)