Chroniclers of loss
Some time ago, I wrote this story on visual reporting on climate change for The Walrus magazine. The political chaos in the US and then federal Liberal leadership race and the federal elections here in Canada put it on the back-burner. I am please to say that it has just been published. Below is an earlier and unedited version I take full responsibility for.
“We are chroniclers of loss.” Swiss photographer Daniel Schwartz says that calmly because he has made peace with it. Pat Kane, a Canadian photojournalist, looks for ways to tell stories that make sense of the world and the way the climate change impacts people who could be your neighbours. On the other side of the world, Lisa Hogben, an Australian photographer who has been documenting wildfires for the past 25 years, is focused on finding ways to document the grief she feels as the landscape around her irreversibly changes.
Photographing climate change is a lot harder than we think. Photographers, editors and curators are searching for a new visual language and experimenting with new ways to tell stories of global climate emergency taking full advantage of photography’s ability to evoke emotions, empathy and human connection at a glance.
And a glance is all a photograph gets. “I think it's like half a second that you spend on average on an Instagram post,” says Jonas Harvard, journalism professor at Mid Sweden University. “People are bombarded with images all the time and getting any message out is a huge challenge.” Together with his co-investigator Mats Hyvönen, he interviewed professional photographers to help him understand how photographers covering climate change respond to those challenges.
“We talk about the attention economy. It's really, really competitive. And then you have this big and important topic of climate change that people really should be instinctively engaged with,” he says.
In 2010, two Canadian scholars, Darryn Wellstead and Nathan Young, looked at how photographs were used in environmental coverage in The Globe and Mail and The National Post. “Most of the coverage of climate change had pictures of politicians because they were the ones who were making decisions,” says Young who today teaches sociology at the University of Ottawa. They also found that a lot of stories were illustrated with stock images. These images employed common tropes including the polar bear on an ice floe, smoke stacks and images of wind turbines and solar panels. Wellstead and Young called those images emotionally benign. “There wasn’t any real connection between images and actions, between causes and effects, between consequences and the human impacts. They were comfortable. They weren't disruptive. They weren't causing people to sit up,” says Young.
Young points out that there are discrepancies between the metaphors we use and the severity of the problem. “The metaphor of the greenhouse has been spectacularly counterproductive because it has this connotation of a gentle warmth that allows things to grow quicker and is a nice place to visit. It has a tropical kind of vibe,” he says.
With increasing severity of weather events fuelled by climate change, he thinks that photographs will focus on human and animal suffering. Jonas Harvard suspects that even those images will quickly become ineffective. “They need to overcome the general hesitance of the spectator to engage with what is painful. We agree rhetorically with the pictures of suffering. We say to ourselves, oh, I agree, this is horrible. We nod in agreement and then we have done our bit,” he says.
The news photographs of immediate devastation after fires, floods, hurricanes and droughts are important, but Harvard says we will need to be more sophisticated if we want to communicate the scale and the impact of climate change. He says the photographers are experimenting with different approaches to environmental photography from collaborations with academic researchers and NGOs to negotiating a fine line between aesthetically pleasing images that don’t upset audiences or advertisers and the severity of the impacts they need to depict.
Daniel Schwartz, who has dedicated his career to environmental issues, is wary of showing environmental degradation as something beautiful. “I can't accept this toxicity transformed into something aesthetic,” he says. He feels that in many ways it simply provides a cover for museums and corporations eager to demonstrate their environmental responsibility. “You put it on the wall, and you're done with it. You have your fig leaf.”
His approaches ranged from strict reportage in his work on southeast Asian river deltas to close collaboration with scientists in his work on glaciers. “Delta” is a remarkable book. Published in 1997, it features black and white reportage photographs from Bangladesh, Myanmar, Vietnam, Cambodia, India, and China. The photographs are focused on individuals and their daily struggle with rising sea levels and are accompanied by extensive captions and text providing detailed context for every image. That book remains one of the models of how to blend together photographs and words and create a complex environmental story.
“I discovered that nobody actually was interested in changing anything and that the politicians just look to the next election. And so I've got a bit angry,” says Schwartz. He did what any angry Swiss would do - he went back to glaciers of his native country that he has been walking on with his father since he was five.
“But the glacier was not there anymore. We had to walk for another hour to meet the glacier that had retreated and collapsed. I realized, yeah, there's a problem here, in Switzerland. I found out climate change is personal.”
It took almost 20 years to complete the work.
“If you do a book, you can make a manifesto,” says Schwartz. “While the Fires Burn: A Glacier Odyssey” is a very different book from “Delta.” Schwartz calls it glaciology in pictures and this visual record stretches across four continents. The photographs are striking, often almost abstract and impossible to look away from. Schwartz thinks of this work as photojournalism. “A.) It's based on research. Secondly, it has implications for societies. Thirdly, it is based on my personal view. I go there and I see it with my own eyes.”
The book is also a close collaboration with scientists who had similar problem to environmental photojournalists - they were dealing with an incredibly complex problem and audiences that demanded simple solutions. “I found much welcome by sciences because they found that photography can help to provide answers and create interest, create a need for change in individual and societal behaviour,” says Schwartz.
But something may be shifting. Last fall, the New York Times Magazine published a visual feature called “Growing Up in Climate Chaos.” This collection of portraits and short interviews from around the world was remarkable for its candour and breath of experiences. The teenagers in the photographs are growing up in a world that is in many ways stacked against them. The portraits caused a range of emotional reactions in the comments: from empathy to every stage of grief, from denial and anger to acceptance. The story was exceptional because of the quality of its reportage, but also because it personalized climate change in ways that we have not often seen in news coverage before.
Pat Kane and Lisa Hogben came to the same conclusion as Schwartz - climate change is personal.
For a photojournalist, dramatic photographs are seductive. Those iconic images of firefighters battling giant forest fires with the background of dark smoke clouds win awards and give us a sense of urgency. In August 2023, as he and his family were evacuating from the wildfires around his hometown of Yellowknife in the Northwest Territories, Pat Kane noticed that those images missed the bigger story. “In my experience and the experience of the people around me, it was less about the smoke and the flames and more about the actual process of evacuating an entire city, which, to me, was the obvious story,” says Kane.
A year later he tracked down some of the evacuees and created a series of portraits and photos of small items that were significant to each person during the evacuation. And he wrote a story about every person he photographed that was eventually published in The Walrus in August 2024.
This approach allowed him to uncover two uncomfortable and connected storylines - how poor the emergency plans in place actually were and that the evacuation was very much tailored to the privileged.
“I think it allowed all of us to pause and go, like, what, what group would I be in? And suddenly you realize how unprepared we are for any kind of these large scale emergencies. As a society, I don't mean as individuals, just as a society. And I think, among people who live here, it was shocking to see just how much was not planned for, how people fell through the cracks,” says Kane. He thinks that those kinds of stories also demonstrate the value local journalists bring to climate change coverage. “It's really about what is actually happening to our friends and neighbors, our community. And I think a lot of times, magazines, newspapers, and publications forget that that is an advantage,” he says.
Kane is experimenting with new ways of presenting his work. Social media provides endless opportunities to share the work, but it’s not the only avenue to show documentary photography. While he continues to publish in magazines and newspapers including The Walrus and National Geographic, he is also seeking out galleries and small informal and intimate spaces where he can present his work to a live audience. It’s another way of building a connection. “I like giving presentations. Every once in a while, I will do one here in Yellowknife just to show people a story that I've worked on. It's kind of like people used to do those slideshows at their home,” says Kane.
Covering climate change comes with a price. Lisa Hogben has been observing and covering environmental issues in Australia for a long time, but the last 10 years have been the hardest. “Watching the changes in the climate and watching things die, that's the horrible thing.”
Hogben grew up in the bushland around Sydney and today lives in the Snowy Mountains. The bushfires of 2003 devastate the region. The increased frequency and ferocity of the fires means that the ecosystem has no time to recover. “All of this is so distressing because you're just watching things die in front of you. That's what all of this is about for me. It's like I'm grieving for this childhood that I had that was filled with native animals and bush and beautiful bush walks,” says Hogben. Communicating that grief visually is at the heart of her on-going project Burnt.
Hogben is rethinking ways that we visually talk about climate grief. Early in her career she worked for a magazine that used sense of humour as an entry point into stories. “I'm just starting to wonder if that's maybe not a good way back in. I just think that putting a lot of photos of disasters is starting to be like, is anyone watching it? Is anyone noticing it anymore? Do we have to make things a bit more like a circus so that people go in and get entertained and then get scared by the horror bits? That might be the only way to get it past people.”
Hogben, Schwartz and Kane are grounding their coverage of climate change in deeply personal photography. They are hoping that through networks they create on-line and in-person they can start conversations around the future of the planet and our lives on it. For Kane, making sense of the world for himself and his neighbours is a way to build those connections. Schwartz sees the books he makes as a record of the forces we unleashed that are changing the planet. He is aware of the complexity of the problem and that there may not be any solutions, but the conversations and the human connections photography can encourage are still important. For Hogben, the ability to create and share deeply personal stories that resonate with the people affected by climate change is paramount. She recalls the bushfires in Victoria in 2009 that she covered at the time. The fires burnt so hot that they would melt pieces of cars and fuse them together into almost unrecognizable mass. That time 173 people died. The fires burnt deep underground. “And that's the thing, nothing can survive that, you know? If that's the planet that we're looking at in the future, we're fucked.”
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