Earth: Aperture 234 Spring 2019

This issue of Aperture considers the natural world in the age of climate change, extreme weather, and dramatically politicized landscapes.

Earth focuses on our relationship with the natural world, during a moment of continued debate about global warming and extreme weather, and as the vulnerability of our natural environment is underscored each day. As we enter the anthropocene, the term used by scientists to describe an age when human activity has the greatest impact on the earth, what is the role of the artist and culture in addressing this crisis? How do photographers honor and draw inspiration from the natural world? How do aesthetics shape our understanding of ecological concerns?

This issue features contributions by writers and photographers including Charlotte Cotton, T.J. Demos, Carolyn Drake, William Finnegan, Bill McKibben, Gideon Mendel, Aveek Sen, David Benjamin Sherry, Lieko Shiga, Thomas Struth, Bruno V. Roels, and Vasantha Yogananthan.

Editor’s Note
When Aperture commissioned Carolyn Drake this past September to photograph the recent wildfires in Northern California, it seemed as if a severe season of destruction had finally concluded. Months passed. As we prepared to go to press with this issue in November 2018, a fresh wave of apocalyptic fires surged across parts of the state, killing dozens, displacing thousands. Hundreds more remained missing. Photographs tend to fall short when faced with such devastation. But Drake’s austere images of ravaged landscapes point to the role of people in creating the conditions for this new, terrifying normal. William Finnegan, who was raised in the state, reminds us that we are in uncharted territory. “It is the Anthropocene,” he says, referring to our geological age defined by human activity. “We must look to our own agency.”
Many of the photographers and writers in this issue do just that. David Benjamin Sherry traveled the United States to document the national monuments reduced in size by the current administration, opening once-protected lands to use by industry. Of Sherry’s arresting, analog color that signals an overheated future, environmentalist Bill McKibben observes that we “glimpse that something has gone wrong and is now going wronger in these places.” Gideon Mendel salvages found photographs from flood zones around the world, conveying the threat of rising sea levels and extreme weather. Eva Díaz, in her look at art and ecofeminism, discusses three contemporary artists who address climate change and challenge the gendered idea of our so-called mastery over Earth. Wanda Nanibush describes the power of photographs for Indigenous artists, which provide “forms of visual sovereignty and assert a continued presence on the land, despite centuries of theft and removal.” She, along with scholar T. J. Demos, underscores the importance of sociopolitical context when considering how we visualize the environment and questions of ecology.
While planetary life may be in peril, it remains a source of visual fascination and discovery. From Anna Atkins’s nineteenth-century cyanotypes of botanical specimens to Karl Blossfeldt’s twentieth-century sculptural plant anatomies, photographers have long found inspiration in natural forms and structures. Following in this tradition are Jochen Lempert, a scientist turned artist who photographs myriad plant life, and Bruno V. Roels, who collages landscape images of palm trees with his own markings and cryptic messages.
The organic world also provides sites for mythology and storytelling. Vasantha Yogananthan’s hand-painted images retell an ancient Indian epic staged in a mythical jungle that is also an actual topography, one now impacted by contemporary concerns of industry and migration, while Arguiñe Escandón and Yann Gross travel to Peru in search of connections to nature in the Amazon. For Lieko Shiga, land is freighted with memory. Human Spring, her new, profoundly original series featured in these pages, grapples with the continued psychological and ecological aftermath of Japan’s 2011 Tohoku earthquake and tsunami. Four days after the disaster, Shiga returned to her studio in Tohoku, only to find it had vanished, along with her home. “What does it mean,” she asked herself, “to no longer be able to live on your own land?” ―Aperture Editors