"Nationalized Nature on Picture Postcards: Subtexts of Tourism from an Environmental Perspective"
Tourists are in a liminal position, on the verge of reality, and they need to communicate the success of this borderline experience back home.
Tourists are in a liminal position, on the verge of reality, and they need to communicate the success of this borderline experience back home.
In the special section “Imagining Anew: Challenges of Representing the Anthropocene,” Tobias Boes examines the hermeneutic and poetic operations by which we as human beings turn our very planet into a signifier for our collective existence as a species, a process he refers to as “planetary mediation.”
This study focuses on the social conflict arisen from the use of camera traps for conservation practices and the “human bycatch,” namely captured images of people occurring mostly unintentionally. The authors argue for the necessity of policy guidelines to counter possible repercussion on the use of the camera trap, which is recognized as a resourceful tool for wildlife monitoring and photography.
Micheal Richardson investigates the impact of envisioning climate catastrophe in three works, namely George Miller’s film Mad Max: Fury Road (2015), Marina Zurkow’s animation Slurb (2009), and Briohny Doyle’s novel The Island Will Sink (2016).
Teena Gabrielson examines the visual politics at work in website photographs depicting environmental justice issues in the United States. She argues for a more inclusive socio-ecological politics which requires visual strategies that resist racialized ways of seeing and make visible the injustice of disproportionate environmental impacts on low-income communities and people of color.
In the special section “Imagining Anew: Challenges of Representing the Anthropocene,” Thomas Lekan offers a postcolonial critique of recent environmentalist literature and exhibitions that frame the Anthropocene using the NASA Apollo mission’s Earthrise (1968) and Blue Marble (1972) photographs from space.
A reflection on the use of images in environmental history.