Picturing Materials: Deconstructing the Camera in Climate Change Art

Elizabeth Xiong

As modern technology continues to saturate society, the ways it intersects with artistic products, production, and the climate have become increasingly relevant. Before the onset of photography, European painters painted sprawling skies and landscapes that recorded their understanding of 19th century environments.^[1] Contemporary photographs depict similar records, and in many cases, make the ongoing climate crisis intelligible. Their visible content powerfully shapes public perceptions of the landscape, and our position in. But what if we look outside the frame, back to the seemingly invisible camera that brings a snapshot to life? Could that reveal even more about climate change art that the surface alone cannot? In this essay, I aim to explore how the dependency on extraction to produce devices that produce art, complicates our understanding of the medium, its ability to depict the climate crisis, and viewer reception.  

        This essay and the questions it raises are grounded in ecocritical art history methods, and builds upon important studies that explore what it means to deconstruct a work of art down to the environmental implications of its materials and labor. In her chapter, art historian Laura Turner Igoe describes the ecocritical lens as one that “reconnects aesthetic objects with their chain of production” and related environmental and social impacts.^[2] She examines how a mahogany chest of drawers (Fig. 1) hides a dark history of deforestation, forced labor and colonization underneath its luxurious craftsmanship. For example, the chest’s classical form and highly finished surface feel aesthetically divorced from the environmental degradation and slave-driven imperial networks that brought tropical hardwoods to colonial America.^[3]

        Recent scholarship has also focused on the ecology of photographic practices, and nonhuman participants in the making of pictures. Robin Kelsey outlines how photography is not free from ecological fault due to its dependence on extraction, and the disposal of toxic chemicals from the camera.^[4] This creates a distance between the reality of producing a photographic image and the pleasurable consumption of its contents.^[5] With a focus on climate change photography and film art, I want to ask how well-meaning content juxtaposed with ecological damage caused by the camera complicates that distance, but also reveals new avenues of empathetic healing. This interest grew out of a chapter in The Routledge Companion to Contemporary Art, Visual Culture and Climate Change, which highlighted the importance of diverse media forms in Indigenous climate change art. What especially piqued my attention was a sentence in the concluding section, where the authors quickly mentioned how “some artists are self reflexive” about the ecological footprints of their work.^[6] I began to wonder: if we are to be united in the fight against climate change, should artworks generated by the same apparatus be given the same ecocritical attention? Would ignoring ecological concerns surrounding the camera unintentionally create a layer of hypocrisy around climate change artworks themselves? As Kelsey puts it “photography cannot reckon with the world’s ecology honestly until it acknowledges its own.”^[7]

        To begin teasing out the implications of these questions, this essay asks to especially consider the mining labor required to extract resources necessary for a functioning camera. It can be easy to lump extraction labor in with other statistics on technological e-waste and energy consumption. However this conveniently keeps it away from discussions about the art these cameras actually produce. The danger here lies in the fact that the camera has been generally appreciated as a device keen on erasing the human hand in order to portray the three dimensional world on a flat surface.^[8] Interestingly, the sleek outer shell of modern cameras also hides evidence of the extracted resources and labor it is composed of (Fig. 2). This double erasure of extraction and human involvement creates a false sense of comfortability that fails to acknowledge other hands and communities which contribute to its creation.

        Before examining the mining industry, Maurice Mbikayi’s photograph Bilele (Fig. 3) first offers an illustration of that false comfortability in the midst of troubling technological materiality. The photograph shows him standing outside a polluted canal in South Africa, wearing a suit made of computer keyboards. Keyboard as clothing nods to a deeply rooted dependence on technology for protection, despite the surrounding pollution caused by it. Curiously, it is not immediately obvious that the canal is polluted. The light blue sky reflects off the water like a protective shield, and sparse greenery attempts to persuade us of flourishing life. However, he asserts that his work addresses toxic e-waste dumping, and the exploitative extraction of rare earth metals in all technological devices that we use.^[9] Suddenly, the keyboard suit no longer feels protective. Rather comfortable witnessing is juxtaposed with troubling ecological realities. We are therefore encouraged to look more closely at what diverse environments and peoples are involved in our everyday objects.

        Exposing materiality in turn invites us to better understand exactly what, and whose labor are behind these camera technologies. Natural resources are now extracted three times faster than they were in 1970, labeling extraction as “the greatest emergency” because of how heavily it has been normalized.^[10] Although there are a myriad of materials in these devices, this essay focuses on cobalt. Cobalt is a rare earth metal that powers rechargeable electronic devices and semiconductors, yet its presence and toxicity remains sterilely hidden behind sleek device designs.^[11] Unbeknownst to the average customer, the majority of the world’s cobalt supply is extracted from the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), which has resulted in displaced communities and ecological contamination that scars the DRC landscape.^[12] Industrial demand has resulted in over 10,000 unscaffolded tunnels, all hand dug by Congolese men, women and children desperate to survive in a fragile mining landscape. These artisanal miners are exploited and made to “labor in slave-like conditions,” yet their stories do not leave the Congo, while the metals that they dig for do.^[13]

        In light of this, it becomes exponentially important to recenter the Congolese peoples when analyzing camera-powered works, which complicates established scholarship. In her chapter Multispecies Cinema in Wretched Waters filmmaker Isabelle Carbonell writes that multispecies embodied cinema deanthropocizes environmental narratives in order to “highlight the interconnections within an ecosystem.”^[14] Her film The River Runs Red  (Fig. 4), partly inspired by Bill Easterson’s Animal Cams (Fig. 5) hinges on the idea that portable cameras attached to animals or left along a river, aim to fully surrender the frame from human hands.^[15] However, applying an ecocritical lens shows that is not the full picture. Labor is embodied and made material in an object.^[16] Therefore in the case of cobalt, which powers what the camera captures, the resulting framing is unquestionably intertwined with the labor of Congolese miners. Exchanging that harsh truth for the pleasant viewing of a film, unjustly ignores the disproportionately affected communities who pay the socio-ecological cost while the majority of those who benefit from their labor do not.

For example, the visible lens flare that makes the device known in Easterson’s Animal Cam footage, can be re-read as a reminder of the material and labor behind all images. Even moreso, it challenges us to reevaluate how anthropological considerations go beyond the hands guiding the camera, by shedding critical light on the humanitarian crisis in the DRC that is fueled by our desire for more technology. Therefore camerawork techniques, that aim to remove traces of the instrument to bring us closer to the environment through art, can also inadvertently distance us from the very issues we want to solve.

Furthermore, that challenges the magical aura around camera technology, where results appear instantaneously at the click of a button, and create an increasingly passive “model of vision.”^[17] Artworks that hope to draw viewers into ecological concerns, such as Barbara Fluxa’s Testimonios Futuros river film installation (Fig. 6) or Ignacio Acosta’s Chilean mining photography series Copper Geographies (Fig. 8), therefore risk passive viewership when seen apart from discussions about the laboring people who power the images we view. The footage of peaceful rivers and photographs of carved mining landscapes risk becoming diluted into an aesthetic. It becomes dangerously simple to view and walk away unaffected, as if the work appeared out of thin air, leaving the camera, scarred bodies and lands required to power it outside the picture frame. However, by centering camera materiality, it non-negotiably centers Congolese miners and their labor. Viewer passivity is challenged, and the separation that Kelsey identified is given a chance to shrink. Thus it becomes harder for a viewer to remain at a safe distance away from the crisis being pictured, and encourages greater engagement that can translate to action.

        Perhaps the power lies in stepping away from an image’s innocence by demystifying the brutal realities of camera technology, and remaining in that uncomfortability. What then does a climate change focused image become, and who does it now explicitly involve? And most importantly, how do we respond? Art historian Andrew Patrizio writes that “attention” is one of the most forceful and generative notions that ecocritical art history offers, since it opens up “energetic alliances with the term ‘care.’”^[18] Economist Jeremy Rifkin noted a similar empathetic awareness due to the world’s digital interconnectedness, but warned that it is made possible by an escalating energy bill.^[19] Therefore climate change art plays a vital role in generating empathetic attention, which means it needs to address its own sustainability too. Before it becomes a grievance of the past that we can only write about, this growing empathy means we also carry a responsibility to act on the current eco-social injustices our technological materials enable. Art therefore provides a space that prompts us to confront the following: if the cameras that picture the climate do not merely witness socio-ecological crises but take part in it, we cannot remain complacent witnesses either.