While looking for a story about climate change in North America, photographer Nina Berman stumbled upon a tiny subject with a huge impact. The Mountain Pine Beetle is an 8 mm-long (about 1/3 of an inch) insect that is killing millions of acres of forest across Canada and the northern United States. Its spread has been scientifically tied to warming temperatures in the northern parts of the continent.
Ms. Berman narrates her portfolio of images on the effects of the insect, which is part of Consequences, a collective documentary project on the changing climate by the Amsterdam-based photo agency NOOR.
“The attack can look beautiful to an untrained eye, especially my eye, as I come from the northeast where red leaves on trees means autumn is approaching. So I had to look not just for the color change, but for trees that were already in the later stages of distress. I also was looking for a human element, something I realized was lacking in most of the images I had seen on the pine beetle,” explains Ms. Berman.
Photographing the changing climate is a creative, as well as a storytelling, challenge. Not all topics are obviously visual.
Significant bio-geographical events are occurring at a continental scale, and a warming climate is the one commonality across all of these spectacular outbreak events. (Logan and Powell, University of Utah, 2004)
“The biggest challenge is to show a larger gravity to the situation, and the untenable conditions we are leaving for the next generation, which is why there are children in my pictures, often alone,” says the photographer. “The other challenge is to connect the evidence of climate change with the cause and I feel I was only partially successful in this with some images where you see automobiles in the frame.”
While photographing the devastation, Ms. Berman did a lot of driving and looking, logging more than 2200 kilometers in five days.
She says this story is the beginning of what will hopefully be a full-time effort in trying to photograph the changes to the climate, trying to make visible what is invisible. “My fantasy for years now has been to photograph CO2 and I really need to team up with some super clever people to see if there is some mechanism to do this photographically.”
The Consequences project involves nine of the agency’s photographers who have been working on documenting the devastating effects of climate change such as genocide in Darfur, the rising sea level in the Maldives, Nenet reindeer herders in Siberia, Inuit hunters in Greenland, a looming crisis in Kolkata, India, coal mining in Poland, oil sand extraction in Canada and the deforestation of the Amazon Rainforest by Brazilian cattle ranchers.
Reception for the work has been good in Europe and the United Kingdom, says Ms. Berman, with major features planned for publication in the coming weeks and months.
“I think people are very interested in how to communicate climate change in a compelling manner and are perplexed as to why knowledge hasn’t turned into political action so anything that helps move that process along, whether art or journalism, will – hopefully – be valued. Personally, I feel like a beginner in the early stages of experimentation, but very eager to try new ways of seeing and photographing.”
The Consequences project premieres at the United Nations Climate Change Conference in Copenhagen, December 7 through December 18, 2009. The project will be on display at the Dask Gallery in the city.
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