Vanishing Landscapes
‘to a world that is felt to have been lost to us, the landscape can provide a healing element, and the gulf between nature and civilisation that has been exacerbated by industrialisation becomes bearable’
‘there no longer seems to be a single untouched plot of land on earth. and even if man has yet to set foot on a tiny section of our planet, his very existence and his actions have already impinged on our whole biosphere’
‘as an image of nature, the landscape can no longer be conceived of as independent of humankind but is always something that we ourselves have created’
(here can relate the aspect of photography to preservation)
‘we need to rethink our entire energy system from scratch in order to bring about real change. our industrial metabolism needs to be rethought’
- joachim schellnhube, of the postdam institute for climate impact research
‘landscape becomes the window of our relationship with reality, images of landscape becoming a reflection of ourselves’
‘ultimately all we can do is hope that by viewing these images we shall finally come to our senses’
this book introduces you to the work of photographers, and the different ways they take up the challenge of photographing the changing climate and how they each individually choose to communicate this catastrophe to the viewer. some confront us by documenting the graphic brutality, whilst others aestheticise the issue, with the caption making the situation clear
‘quite clearly it enables us to experience things that otherwise appear to have long been contaminated by mechanical reproduction... perhaps why walter benjamin defined one of his key concepts - aura - by the means of the image of a landscape’
‘these images of vanishing landscapes open up spaces that the observer cannot enter but which remain accessible to our powers of reflection’
