17.8: After the Sublime- Landscape, Climate, and Environmental Witness

Edward Burtynsky, Manufactured Landscapes, 1983-2003.

Edward Burtynsky, Oil, 1997-2009.

Edward Burtynsky, Anthropocene, 2018.

This question has become central to contemporary climate imagery. Photographs of ecological disaster can easily become spectacular. A wildfire may produce dramatic orange skies. An oil spill may create seductive patterns on water. A melting glacier may appear luminous and majestic. Such images can generate concern, but they can also turn catastrophe into visual pleasure. The problem is not that disaster should never be pictured beautifully. The problem is that beauty can distance viewers from responsibility. It can make environmental damage seem tragic, inevitable, or sublime rather than political and preventable.

Contemporary photographers often address this problem by connecting landscape to human systems. Instead of presenting damaged land as an isolated scene, they show the infrastructures, communities, industries, and histories that produce environmental crisis. Mitch Epstein’s American Power, for example, examines energy production and consumption in the United States, photographing power plants, refineries, dams, wind farms, and the communities around them.³ The project asks viewers to see energy not as an abstract convenience, but as a physical and political system built into the landscape.

LaToya Ruby Frazier’s work is especially important for understanding environmental racism and uneven exposure to harm. In The Notion of Family, Frazier photographs Braddock, Pennsylvania, a town shaped by the steel industry, economic decline, environmental damage, and public health crisis.⁴ Her work refuses the idea that environmental damage happens “out there” in remote landscapes. Instead, she shows that industry enters homes, bodies, families, and generations. The landscape is not only the land around a community. It is also the social and industrial environment that conditions daily life.

LaToya Ruby Frazier, Mom Making an Image of Me, from The Notion of Family, 2008, Institute of Contemporary Art - Boston.

Environmental racism describes the unequal distribution of environmental harm along lines of race, class, and political power. Some communities are more likely to live near refineries, toxic waste sites, polluted water, highways, industrial corridors, or areas vulnerable to flooding and heat. Photography can help make this uneven exposure visible, but it must avoid turning affected communities into symbols of damage. Frazier’s work is powerful because it combines environmental witness with personal and familial intimacy. She does not photograph Braddock as an abandoned industrial ruin. She photographs it as a lived place.

This distinction matters. Environmental photography can sometimes repeat the visual logic of extraction by entering damaged communities, taking images, and leaving. A more responsible environmental witness asks how images are made, who is represented, and who benefits from their circulation. It recognizes that communities are not only victims of environmental harm. They are also sites of knowledge, resistance, care, memory, and survival.

Indigenous land, sovereignty, and representation are also essential to this section. Many landscapes celebrated in photographic history as “wilderness” were never empty. They were and remain Indigenous homelands. The idea of untouched nature often depended on the erasure of Indigenous presence, stewardship, displacement, and sovereignty. Landscape photography participated in this erasure when it framed land as available for national expansion, tourism, conservation, or aesthetic possession without acknowledging the people whose histories and rights were tied to those places.

Contemporary environmental photography must therefore ask who has the right to represent land and from what position. Indigenous artists and scholars have challenged the colonial idea that land is simply property, resource, or scenery. They emphasize land as relation: a living network of responsibility, memory, kinship, law, and survival.⁵ Photography that engages Indigenous land must therefore move beyond scenic appreciation and confront histories of removal, extraction, treaty violation, ecological stewardship, and ongoing sovereignty.

Subhankar Banerjee’s work in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge demonstrates how landscape photography can enter environmental politics directly. His photographs of Arctic ecosystems, caribou migration, and Indigenous communities were used in debates over oil drilling, showing how images of remote landscapes can become part of public arguments over land use, conservation, and sovereignty.⁶ Banerjee’s work is important because it connects the landscape to ecological systems and political decision-making. The photograph becomes not only a view, but a form of advocacy.

Subhanker Banerjee, Artic National Wildlife Refuge: Seasons of Life and Land, 2003.

Richard Misrach’s long-term work also shows how landscape can reveal hidden histories of violence. His photographs of deserts, military test sites, industrial corridors, and borderlands often show places shaped by power that is not immediately visible. In the series Cancer Alley, made in collaboration with landscape architect Kate Orff, Misrach photographed communities along the Mississippi River between Baton Rouge and New Orleans, an area heavily affected by petrochemical industry.⁷ The work connects landscape, industry, public health, and environmental injustice. The river is not simply picturesque. It is part of an industrial and racialized geography.

Richard Misrach, Petrochemical America, 1998-2012, Fraenkel Gallery.

The term “witness” is important here, but it should be used carefully. To witness is not simply to look. It implies responsibility. Environmental witness requires attention to what is visible and what is hidden, what is immediate and what is slow, what is spectacular and what is ordinary. It also asks viewers to recognize their own position within the systems being photographed. Climate crisis is not something happening elsewhere to other people. It is connected to patterns of consumption, energy use, transportation, agriculture, housing, waste, and political decision-making.

Photography can make those systems visible, but it cannot solve them alone. This is one of the limits of environmental imagery. A photograph may produce shock, grief, or awareness, but awareness does not automatically lead to action. Viewers may feel overwhelmed or powerless in the face of large-scale ecological damage. The repeated circulation of disaster images can produce fatigue rather than engagement. Contemporary photographers must therefore find ways to move beyond visual alarm. They must create images that help viewers understand relationships, causes, consequences, and forms of resistance.

Some artists respond by emphasizing scale. Aerial and satellite views can show patterns of deforestation, mining, industrial agriculture, urban expansion, melting ice, or water depletion that are difficult to see from the ground. Such images can be powerful because they reveal systems. Yet aerial views can also create distance. They may turn environmental harm into abstraction, making damage appear beautiful, patterned, or remote. The challenge is to balance visual scale with human and ecological consequence.

Other artists respond by emphasizing intimacy. Rather than photographing disaster from above, they focus on bodies, homes, family histories, local landscapes, or everyday acts of survival. This approach can make climate and environmental crisis feel less abstract. It also challenges the idea that environmental photography must always show vast landscapes. Sometimes the most meaningful environmental image may be a portrait, a kitchen sink, a damaged wall, a family album, a worksite, or a child playing near contaminated land.

Dionne Lee’s work offers another important direction. Using photography, collage, video, and sculptural approaches, Lee explores Black relationships to land, survival skills, navigation, and environmental knowledge. Her work complicates the history of landscape by connecting land to race, vulnerability, and self-reliance. Rather than treating nature as a pristine escape, Lee examines land as a place of danger, skill, memory, and possibility.⁸ This expands environmental photography beyond documentation of damage and toward questions of how people learn to survive within changing conditions.

The twenty-first-century landscape is therefore not only a place of loss. It is also a place of contested meaning. It contains grief, but also stewardship, adaptation, resistance, and repair. Contemporary photographers must navigate this complexity. Images of climate crisis can mourn what is being lost, but they can also show how people continue to live, organize, protect, and imagine other relationships to land.

This is why contemporary landscape photography often moves “after the sublime.” The sublime traditionally depended on awe before forces larger than the human body: mountains, storms, oceans, deserts, glaciers, vastness. But in the age of climate crisis, awe is no longer innocent. The forces that overwhelm us are not only natural. They are industrial, colonial, economic, and political. The burning forest, flooded city, toxic river, and melting ice shelf cannot be understood as nature alone. They are also historical consequences.

To photograph landscape now is to photograph responsibility. Even when people are absent from the frame, human systems may be everywhere: in the altered atmosphere, the engineered river, the mined mountain, the fenced border, the poisoned soil, the managed forest, the disappearing shoreline. Contemporary landscape photography teaches viewers to read land as evidence. It asks us to see beauty and damage together, and to understand that neither is neutral.

At its best, environmental photography does not simply show what has been harmed. It changes how viewers understand relation. Land is not background. It is not empty space. It is not an object waiting to be possessed, consumed, or admired from a distance. It is a living, historical, and political field in which human and nonhuman lives are entangled. Photography can help make that entanglement visible, but it must do so with care.

The task of twenty-first-century landscape photography is therefore not to abandon beauty, but to complicate it. Beauty can still matter. It can draw viewers close, create attachment, and remind us why places are worth protecting. But beauty must be held alongside history, harm, and responsibility. The contemporary landscape photograph asks viewers not only to admire the world, but to recognize what has been done to it, who has been made to bear the cost, and what forms of repair might still be possible.

Footnotes:

1. Rob Nixon, Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor. Harvard University Press, 2011.
2. Edward Burtynsky, Manufactured Landscapes: The Photographs of Edward Burtynsky. Yale University Press, 2003.
3. Mitch Epstein, American Power. Steidl, 2009.
4. LaToya Ruby Frazier, The Notion of Family. Aperture, 2014.
5. Candice Hopkins, “Outlawed Social Life.” South as a State of Mind, no. 7, Documenta 14, 2016; Leanne Betasamosake Simpson, As We Have Always Done: Indigenous Freedom through Radical Resistance. University of Minnesota Press, 2017.
6. Subhankar Banerjee, Arctic National Wildlife Refuge: Seasons of Life and Land. Mountaineers Books, 2003.
7. Richard Misrach and Kate Orff, Petrochemical America. Aperture, 2012.
8. “Dionne Lee.” Aperture, aperture.org; Dionne Lee, Trap and Lean-to. MACK, 2022.