The Toxic Sublime: Landscape Photography and Data Visualization

Abstract

If the cliché about garbage – ‘Out of sight, out of mind’ – is true, its inverse, unfortunately, is not. Heaps and masses of garbage brought into direct view still somehow manage to escape acute recognition, let alone social responsibility or global political activism. This article investigates this trend as a growing problem between the human world and representation. Focusing on historical and contemporary landscape photography, the article questions whether data visualization trends, particularly those that attempt to visualize the post-industrial consumer landscape, help or hinder our capacity to understand our environment, and possibly even ecological endeavors. The article charts the history of photography’s landscape genre, mapping the contours of a shift from the classical ‘nature’ aesthetic, to an industrial, post-industrial, and eventually a mathematical aesthetic contingent on emergent techniques and data visualization in the attempt to depict ever amassing magnitudes of environmental despoliation.

Environmental aesthetics: A synthetic review

“…Currently, such work is very sparse within what can be broadly construed as the philosophical environmental aesthetics literature. Environmental aesthetic theories have been brought to bear on landscape photography (see Friday, 1999), with particular attention being paid to photographic representations of the aesthetics of environmental degradation (Bürkner, 2014; Kane, 2018). Analyses of the photographic work of Edward Burtynsky are notable here, wherein the notion of the ‘industrial’ or ‘toxic’ sublime as an aesthetic category has been developed (Ray, 2016; Schuster, 2013; Zehle, 2008).…”

Representations of Post-Industrial Shanghai

“…As an attempt at survival, the apparent neutral aesthetics of the new topographic vernacular photography took a similar stance to the Russian formalists, whose aesthetic devices departed from the idea that art is something extraordinary, whilst non-art records can be designated as ordinary. Hence, it is the ambiguity of these topographic works that both beautify and strip industrialization of any pictorial frills and which position those artists as the most politicized and activist documentary photographers (Kane 2018). The neutrality of the documentary in the new topographers can also be put into question in their appropriation and re-appropriation of an everlasting continuum of striking iconic symbols and vernacular vocabularies from previous documentary photographers, including pictorialists and modernist movements of all kinds.…”

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

“…There is also literature on photography and post-industrial spaces and ruin. Carolyn Kane (2018) refers to photography of environmental degradation as the toxic sublime. The juxtaposition captures the sense of harm and beauty that is intermingled in decommissioned industrial and nuclear sites (also see Kuletz, 1998;Peeples, 2011).…”

“…Perhaps tracing itself can infiltrate these industrial-chemical-polluted assemblages (Peck, 2016) and transform or allure others to act differently or uncover other facets of these processes. Contributing to the project of doing art in the anthropocene (Davis and Turpin, 2015) and contesting destructive resource extraction, tracing has an aesthetic merit (Kane, 2018) very different from that of realist photography, and we hope it may resonate in more affective and sensual ways with participants and viewers. Expanding this project beyond social sciences and environmental research is intended to introduce diverse and inclusive kinds of eyes and sight to the act of interpretation, to collectively think about what is not shown and what might be omitted, and to unsettle reliance on photographic images as objective reality, thereby troubling notions of photographic positivism relying on realist readings.…”