How can photography be used to better understand complex systems?
On Wednesday, climate scientists got uncharacteristically sweary about our collective inaction on climate change.
What the fuck do we have to do to get through to people how bad this really is?
The climate system is extremely complex, unfolding over time and space and through multiple physical, chemical, and biological processes.
The article made two interesting visual choices, 1) simple, straight, ‘academic professional’, photographic portraits of climate scientists, and 2) video loops of photograph collages, which build and impression of the complex climate system and its components.
I would argue the collage approach is a photography for complex systems. Each photograph is a data point or emotion of an event, which are then physically linked, to build an impression of the overall event of climate change to which they belong.
The recent reframing of the Anthropocene from a geological epoch and stratigraphic to an Earth event, like the Great Oxygenation two billion years ago, is instructive here.
How to represent through a photograph the transformation of an entire system? How to understand and see the new Earth system?
Non-climate scientists have been pointing out for a while that climate change asks us questions that climate science cannot answer. Meaning, what’s needed is more than understanding changes in the climate system.
Challenges for visual communicators is two-fold, where to look to for questions and what form of answers will be understood and listened to?
kristin wilson 