My research began with my mind map. As I started to connect keywords like "climate change," "ocean," "conservation," "protection," and "photography," I discovered that the the best way to communicate the topic is through an eye-catching blend of conceptual and factual works. From there I began to look at conservation photographers, visual artists, and graphic designers, as well as research topics on marine conservation and the influence of photography.
Semester Two Update: Upon returning from break, I narrowed the theme of my project for marine conservation to share the story of the resilient colony of Little Penguins living in the urban shoreline of St. Kilda. This work and narrative is in collaboration with Julia Morais - a Brazilian/Portuguese veterinarian and PhD student at Monash University, whose work pertains to studying and monitoring the colony to help them sustain in this complex environment.
My key words became resilience, adaptation and endurance.
Visual Influencers
Visual Artists
Susan Derges is a British photographic artist who uses a cameraless photographic practice involving digital experimentation. Most of her work involves the self and nature through visual metaphors, such as mimicking landscapes, the physical form of sound and the cycles of the moon. She centers on the theme of environmental issues, through using conceptual and scientific approaches. Susan's partnered with a number of artists in the publication Surveying the Anthropocene, which uses images to raise concerns about mankind's relationship with the environment. Susan uses methods like filling a tank with grass, ink, gravel and water in her darkroom and creating a photogram of the natural world.
Susan is a great influence in creating alternative, abstract perspectives on the natural world.
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Mandy Barker is another British photographic artist whose work centers around the theme of marine plastics. She has come up with countless ways to present the topic of climate change in her work over the last 16 years. She works alongside scientists to raise awareness on the plastic in our oceans and the harmful effects it has. Her work has been exhibited in over 50 countries, creating lots of traction in inspiring action for change. Though she began her career as a graphic designer, Mandy is not apart of the The Royal Photographic Society's Environmental Bursary that allowed her to sail across the Pacific Ocean to view marine plastic in the tsunami debris fields. Her work has been recognized by Sir David Attenborough, who wrote her a handwritten letter stating,
“I hope your work does its job in raising an awareness of the cause we both care so much about.
With renewed wonder and best wishes”
With renewed wonder and best wishes”
In Mandy's series Penalty, which came out around the time of the 2014 FIFA World Cup, she collaged over 700 images of footballs together to raise awareness on plastic pollution by dedicating each image to objects found in oceans around the world, such as footballs.
In her series Indefinite, Mandy uses objects washed up from the beach that look similar to marine life. Images like Titled Indefinite – 1-3 Years, which shows a plastic bag that resembles a jellyfish, with the title stating the estimate time it will take for this single item to break down.
Mandy is another great example for alternative ways to document and visually convey the message of climate change in our oceans.
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Cecilia Sordi Campos is a Brazilian visual artist, writer and researcher now residing in Melbourne for more than a decade. She creates wet-cyanotypes that pay tribute to the land and sea. In her work Chimera, Campos states that the work was made...
"between myself, the land and time. The cyanotypes were exposed for days and then washed with rain or dam water. But, they were never fully developed, in the hope the pieces will continue to change over time, just as my own connection to places continue to shift and evolve."
I connected with Campos to learn more about her work. She uses many experimental techniques, not to be shared, that lead to this look.
Meghann Riepenhoff is a U.S. artist who received her BFA in photography from the University of Georgia, and an MFA from San Francisco Art Institute. She has had her work shown in The New York Times, Oprah Magazine, and numerous other publications. She experiments with many different mediums and methods, such as chromogenic photograms, cyanotypes, color darkroom, fenestella, eluvium.
In her work Littoral Drift, Riepenhoff uses waves, rain, wind, and sediment to imprint on cyanotypes. Some are partially buried in the sand, while others sit in the surf with the tide pulling the chemicals across the prints.
She tributes her work to, "the nature of our relationships to the landscape, the sublime, time, and impermanence."
Campos, C. (2017) Chimera.
Campos, C. (2017) Chimera.
Campos, C. (2017) Chimera.
Campos, C. (2017) Chimera.
Littoral Drift Nearshore #502 (Bainbridge Island, WA 04.01.16, Two Waves and Salt, Scattered and Poured); 21x42"
Littoral Drift #93 (Shine Tidelands, Port Ludlow, WA 01.02.17, Five Waves During Tidal Drawback); 42x93"
Littoral Drift #09 (Rodeo Beach, CA 11.07.13, Three Waves, Buried and Flooded); 24” x 30”
Littoral Drift #48 (Tower Beach, Hilton Head, SC 06.13.13, Three Waves, Dipped and Buried); 14"x11"
Both of these artists collaborate with their marine ecosystems to help tell the tale of their relationship with nature.
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Photographers
Ami Vitale is a National Geographic photojournalist, documentary filmmaker, and writer. She is also the founder of the organization, Vital Impacts, that is a women-led non-profit that uses storytelling and art to support and raise funds for community led conservation and humanitarian efforts. Her photographic work began on the front lines of war documenting soldiers, and has transformed into a fight for our environment to end climate change and wildlife extinction. She has a unique ability to highlight the positive side of conservation through highlighting stories of resilience and innovation in preserving and restoring our natural world.
Vitale is a distinguished photographer with a fine art approach to photojournalism - a skill I hope to acquire. Her images are compelling and emotive, with a powerful draw the leads the viewer captivated on the stories she shares. Her complete control of lighting in an outdoor environment allows her images to appear as if they were from a movie. She often spends months to years with her subjects to create a strong bond, and using that connection and understanding to properly portray them through her lens.
Vitale's style, technique and values align with my projects vision and is a model that I want to follow long-term.
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Matthew Abbott is an extraordinary photojournalist from Sydney, Australia. His work centers around long-term storytelling where he has built a strong connection with his subject, combined with in-depth research and understanding. His work has taken him all over the globe, reporting for publications like the New York Times, Washington Post and National Geographic. Abbott, like Vitale, is a conservationist and humanitarian. His photographic stories have become internationally known and awarded for their compelling nature and vast grasp of the subject matter. Furthermore, he is a lecturer who speaks at colleges, museums, and corporate functions - as well as runs workshops to helps spread the word of the cause and narrative he is putting into the world.
In his work shown below, titled Black Summer, it is easy to see how invested Abbott gets to his subject, even to the point of placing himself near raging wildfires. Abbott's style shows strong contrast and saturation, but in a delicate way that balances the photo. He and Vitale work well under pressure and in tough shooting conditions. As I work on the fly with Julia, capturing candid moments throughout her fieldwork, I hope to harness this same skill of permeating the decisive moment.
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Mick Sowry is a storyteller, a surfer, a photographer, filmmaker, and author. Sowry's work is all about the ocean – speaking about our, and his, relationship to the sea and the marine life that calls it home. He has been featured in The Surfer's Journal, and Surfing World, Surfline. He is the creative director and co-publisher of the magazine, Great Ocean Quarterly, that discusses art, ideas and the marine world.
I chose to showcase pages and covers from the Great Ocean Quarterly, along with his image below, because I enjoy his design layout, his use of light, and the stories he chooses to share on others relationship to the sea.
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Derek Henderson
Harvest
Derek Henderson is a photographer who turns the ordinary into the extraordinary. His work captures everyday moments and people, and shares their stories in a soft tone that leaves space for contemplation. His strong eye for composition helps turn his images of the mundane into captivating works of art, which is quite challenging when some of the photographs are of familiar, quotidian items. In his recent book, Harvest, he follows the Filbrun family as they garden a variety of vegetables and live entirely sustainably. Their organic lifestyle is portrayed in his book as they leave no trace of waste and think towards the future in preserving all seeds for the next harvest. I quite enjoyed this documentary because it uses a range of angles and color treatments to get the narrative across while remaining cohesive. I have always enjoyed photo books that break the rules and use both color and black and white imagery.
Henderson's work is captivating as you get the feeling this family can be their authentic selves around him. It feels like a true representation of the Filbrun's without me ever knowing them. He finds the right twists and turns to document without any image seeming staged. His work uses low contrast, unlike Vitale and Abbott's, which works as their is the feeling of ease and not conflict. I like that his style speaks to the characters lifestyles.
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Nora Bibel
Uncertain Homelands
Nora Bibel is an internationally traveling freelance artist and photographer from Germany. Her love for the medium led her to becoming a professor for photography at Media University's Berlin campus. Her work mostly focuses on portraiture and documentary photography, where she often speaks towards social change. However her book, Uncertain Homelands, covers a greater scale by speaking to both social and climate change on the world, particularly in Indonesia, Namibia, and Germany. She traveled to these various countries taking intimate portraits, drone landscape images and interviewing those who have become victims by the effect of human-caused climate crises. Her work not only shows the threats these individuals are facing, but also their resilience through adaptation strategies to counteract these impacts. Her book's title speaks to the uncertainty of our lives will change due to climate change.
I appreciate not only the subject and theme of the book, but also its layout. It is well balanced with text and imagery, while still leaving breathing room. She overlaps images and landscapes, showing the layers to this crisis. I also enjoy her ability to overlap infographics and images without creating visual chaos, helping lead and inform the viewer on the narrative.
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Jo Scicluna
Jo Scicluna is an Australian photographer who shares her work in conceptual ways. In her work Where the Land Lies, Scicluna speaks to the tension and problematic cultural practice within Australia's landscape photography. She decided to take a new approach that involved collaborating with the Gunaikurnai community. She became influenced by these interactions – changing her choice of framing and focus on her subjects with what to share and add, and what to keep hidden and remove. Her work considers the idea of one's place in relation to the land. It uses conceptual, abstract methods to showcase this work, as it hangs, reveals, or caves in.
Jo Scicluna. Where The Land Lies #15 & #16 (2019). Layered archival inkjet prints on cotton rag paper, tinted acrylic, walnut timber. Gippsland Art Gallery.
Jo Scicluna. Where The Land Lies #1 (2019). Layered offset prints an archival paper, acrylic, vinyl, MDF and paint. Gippsland Art Gallery.
Jo Scicluna. Where The Land Lies #4 (2019). Layered archival inkjet prints on cotton rag paper, acrylic, Victorian Ash timber. Gippsland Art Gallery.
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Designers
I love it. What is it?: The Power of Instinct in Design and Branding by Turner Duckworth and Gyles Lingwood.
This book is one I keep coming back. It shares the decades of philosophies, learnings, and adventures of the design company of Turner Duckworth. It shares their thought process into branding big named companies like Amazon, McDonald’s, Coca-Cola, and Metallica. I love that it include think pieces over the design process, as it is relatable to any field of creative problem solving. Moreso, I love the design of the book itself. The leading swirling lines capturing quotes, the heart the folds onto the cover, the use of color pairings between illustrations and text - all very intentional.
I am looking at this book as inspiration for being more intentional with my layout - considering lines, colors, typefaces, scale and placement.
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Nick Brant is an English photographer, who began his studies in painting and film. All of Nick’s series contain a common theme – speak to the destructive impact mankind has on the natural world and create a visual poem that pays tribute the wildlife and landscapes before they are taken out by man. Nick has developed a style that connects viewers to his images – showing the beauty, the detail, the love, the bonds, and the struggles these animals go through – just like humans.
His series Inherit the Dust captures life size panels of animal portraits in developing regions of the world – speaking to the harm humans on not just wildlife, but each other. His work speaks to climate change and mankind’s actions impacting one another and all parts of the world. In his recent work Sink/Rise, Nick shows South Pacific Islanders under water to reflect what the impact rising tides have had on the livelihoods of these islanders. Nick now resides in the United States, where his talent is internationally known. His work goes beyond photography, having developed an award-winning music video for artists like Michael Jackson.
Nick is an inspiration in many ways, whether through his style to evoke an emotional response and his creative choices for storytelling, or his passion to instill awareness and create positive change. His ideas of placing images in an original context, and creating scenes that look like something out of photoshop is astounding. It motivates me to create a photobook where the images are laid out in an original, or unusual way.
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Richard Mosse is an Irish photographer and internationally renowned artist, based in the United States. His work focuses on humanitarian and environmental crises in our current time. Richard’s latest series, Broken Spectre, is in response to the ongoing deforestation in the Amazon Rainforest and its impact on climate change. To generate attention, Richard created a 74-minute-long film that contains years (2018 to 2022) of photographic work using different camera techniques. Methods such as cinematic monochrome infrared photography, leaving an ink-like appearance, and fluorescent infrared, leaving a vivid scene on what is now scarce.
Not only do my values align with the message behind Richard’s work, but I like his choice of aesthetic. The chaos the monochrome infrared leaves behind, like a pen exploding over the image and permanently blacking out parts of the scene, is something I would like to inflict on my own work. The black and white visual also gives us a sign of nostalgia– a bitter realization of the war the amazon’s fights and the mark that it will never be what it was.
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Luke Shadbolt and Russell Ord are two Australian photographers that capture the ocean in its moments of beauty and power. Russel is an award-winning photographer and filmmaker who works with organizations, like Surfrider, to improve the well-being of disadvantaged communities through his surf photography. Luke is a multidisciplinary artist, who affinity with the ocean and the environment drives his work. His work is internationally exhibited, and he has a background in graphic design, art direction, publishing, and commercial photography. Luke also works with charity organizations like Surfrider, as well as take3forthesea and parley.tv – who all strive for marine conservation.
Luke and Russel create striking work that sculpt sea waves into fine-art imagery, provoking a sense of awe among their viewers. Their sentient style is something I admire and hope to hone this skill in my own folio to inspire action for climate change among viewers.
Russel Ord
Luke Shadbolt
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Sebastião Salgado is a Brazilian photographer who paints a picture of *unchanged landscapes and people from the impact and destruction of modern-day society in his series Genesis. He dedicates it to the planet– stating it is his love letter. Sebastião is renowned for his work and lengthy career in photography. He and his partner on their own doing have restored parts of the Atlantic Forest in Brazil to combat mankind’s impact. The environmentalist is a role model of mine in his passion for adventure and storytelling with a cause.
*Climate change does impact these places, but they are not colonized by modern society.
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Chris Burkard is a U.S. photographer who got his start into photography through surfing. His work is all about outdoor adventures, exploring the world and its land and seas. His book, The Ocean is all about his journey through life being connected to the sea and what he has learned from it. It pays tribute to the ocean and the lessons it has taught him.
His work takes the viewer to all seven seas and tries to inspire action for protection over these waterways. Burkard hopes to alter the perception of the ocean as a place to be exploited, as instead a source of wonder and awe-inspiring beauty that requires respect and stewardship.
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Cristina Mittermeier is a a notable award-winning photographer, conservationist, marine biologist, and author and speaker from Mexico. She and her partner, Paul Nicklen, are dedicated to using photography as a tool for spreading awareness about the world around us that needs our protection.
She is the founder of the International League of Conservation Photographers (ILCP) and co-founder of SeaLegacy, non-profit organizations that use art and science to promote conservation and protect our oceans for the benefit of biodiversity, humanity, and climate within our lifetime. She is known as a pioneer of conservation photography.
Her most recent book, HOPE speaks to marine conservation in a positive light sharing that the fight for conserving the natural world around us is not over and there is still beauty out there that we can save.
She says that, “images can help us understand the urgency many photographers feel to protect wild places...The only way to tackle the environmental crises is by painting a picture of what our dream should be."
Her work has been shown in National Geographic, TIME, and Disney+.
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Mixed-Media Artists
Jay Kelly is a self-taught figurative collage artist, photographer and graphic designer. He uses a range of collage materials, such as vintage magazines, old maps, novels, and art history books. He hand tears and glues each piece together, layering each strip onto a canvas. He states that he enjoys creating something tangible in a digital world and is inspired by nature and the concept of nostalgia.
Benjamin West is photo collage artist and photographer from London. He earned a BA in Graphic & Media Design from the London College of Communication that has influenced his work. Each series carries environmental messages. They either speak to issues such as pollution and its impact on Britain, or it carries a political and urban undertone that speaks to natures relationship with the anthropocene.
Kelly, J. (n.d.) Living Color.
Kelly, J. (n.d.) Deep into The.
Kelly, J. (n.d.) Care-Free.
Kelly, J. (n.d.) By Chance.
West, B. (2019) EAST LANDS.
West, B. (2021) PLANT MACHINA 1.
West, B. (2020) UNKNOWN FOREST.
West, B. (2021) PLANT MACHINA 7.
Other visual references include: Anne Gabriel-Jürgens, Nicolas Floc'h (big fan of his book Initium Maris), Mayumi Suzuki, Taiyo Onorato & Nico Krebs (big fan of their book Water Column), Lewis Burnett (aka Hunting for Paradise), Matty Hannon, and Alex Kydd.