Living on the coast of the southern Fleurieu Peninsula in South Australia has meant that I've become familiar with both the local, banal or unscenic bushland that is considered unworthy of aesthetic attention, and making large format landscapes of this region. Since the past three decades have witnessed a growing awareness of climate change and its impacts on people and the natural environment, photographing nature needs to take this impact into account. How to do that with a camera and a lens is something that I struggle with without resolving.
The two pictorial realist photos in this post are ones that look at the non-human world in the context of what is happening to nature in the context of the background climate heating. A first attempt, as it were, to link landscape photography and climate heating, to push the traditional centre of the human experience and the human aesthetic preferences aside and to initiate a photography of mourning within the tradition of landscape photography.
This has made me aware of my unease with the views of those who hold that we live in a post-natural world. A post-natural world means that nature is no longer independent of human activity. The world we inhabit is the one we humans have made.The cultural concept for this new planetary epoch is the Anthropocene condition in which the geological strata we are now creating record industrial emissions, industrial-scale crop pollens, and the disappearance of species driven to extinction. This cultural concept is used by many to describe an era of accelerating human impacts such as climate change and biodiversity loss.
However, if climate change is the emblematic crisis of the neo-liberal Anthropocene, turning the world’s climate into a joint human-natural creation, then nature is still ontological independent of humans --- it existed before us and will likely go on existing after us. Though the world we inhabit will be one that we have helped to make, and in ever-intensifying ways, there is no need reject terms such as the natural world. By “the natural world,” we mean the material structures and processes of the non-human world. So we should say nature is no longer unaffected by human activity. Humans are dependent on nature but nature is not dependent on humans. Nature will continue to exit without us and will produce new species and forms of life without human intervention. .