Making Steel, Making Prosperity, Making Pollution, Making Images: The Environmental Photography of Steel Mills

Bossen, Howard; Freedman, Eric

doi:10.1080/15551393.2015.1061434

Cited by 2 publications

(3 citation statements)

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“…Viewers can become stuck in a mode where they feel distant from the toxic site and powerless to remediate it (Peeples, 2011). Environmental photography (Bossen and Freedman, 2015) raises ethical and political questions about the nature and future of industry and resource extraction. There is a critical politics and an ethics to imaging contaminated landscapes (Balayannis, 2019; Davies, 2019; Kuchinskaya, 2014) that informs our approach.…”

Section: Engaging With Visual Methods and Counter-visual Analysismentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Because of this duality in the photograph and in the material scenes depicted, Christopher Pinney (2008) calls the photograph both a cure and a poison. This is a position held in environmental photography more broadly (Bossen and Freedman, 2015). The idea of picturing things that are both alluring and poisonous also appears in Julia Peck's (2016) notion of vibrant photography, which draws attention to petro-chemical runoff and leaking as actants having capacities to undo or reverse life, and the ethics of introducing such elements into the world.…”

Section: B R I N G I N G V I S U a L A R T S A N D S O C I A L S C I ...mentioning

confidence: 98%

“…There is no shortage of artistic and scholarly work examining representations of environmental damage and ecological destruction (Bossen and Freedman, 2015;Burtynsky et al, 2018;Lippard, 2014;Ray, 2016). This literature has explored the ways that photography and visual representation can raise awareness about contamination and pollution.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Tailings and tracings: using art and social science to explore the limits of visual methods at mining and industrial ruins

Walby

Davis

2022

Visual Communication

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This article examines a novel approach to visual methods that artist Ben Davis has developed based on sociologist Kevin Walby’s research into decommissioned industrial sites, which is referred to here as tracing. Disrupting the over-reliance on photographic representation in visual methods in the social sciences, the authors integrate audio recordings of interviews, as well as photos, maps, and building plans for pop-up mining communities into visual art works to provide a counter-visual analysis of the landscapes depicted in Kevin Walby’s photographs of Uranium City. After reviewing literature on environmental degradation and on visual methods, the article elaborates on Ben Davis’s practice of tracing as a technique representing the feeling of decomposition and decay generated by the harms of industrial resource extraction. The authors argue that the technique of tracing excavates layered histories of place, providing a way of creating new interpretations of social and environmental issues. They then discuss how this counter-visual analysis and approach to tracing enables a trans-disciplinary and dialogical space for engagement with academics, artists, and activists to explore issues centered on land, contamination, and justice.

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