Foreword

Summary

Studies Editions is a new initiative by Studies in Photography / the Scottish Society for the History of Photography which publishes a series of books on photography, alongside our well-established biannual journal Studies in Photography and our limited editions of prints. These books deal with specific topics in more depth than is possible within the scope of a journal article.

We are delighted that this book in the series considers a topic that is of such enormous relevance today: the contribution of photography to an understanding of pressing environmental issues and debates. The book provides an overview of the wide range of ways in which international artist-photographers are currently surveying the increasingly heavy impacts of human activity on the Earth's interrelated operational systems, in particular climate and the web of life, including human life. These works, in all their impressive variety, offer powerful comment on the multiple effects of what has come to be called, not without controversy, the Anthropocene epoch, or ‘age of humans’ – a time during which the degree and extent of global human activity will leave a clear impact in the rocks of the future geological record. The book is particularly timely in this year in which the UK hosts the crucial COP26 Climate Conference, in Glasgow, and in which the Covid-19 pandemic – probably indirectly caused by environmental degradation – continues to rage worldwide.

The seed for the book was an invitation from the Editorial Team of Studies in Photography to the eminent artist-photographer Patricia Macdonald to guest-edit an issue of the journal, focussing on the environment. Alongside her work using photography, Dr Patricia Macdonald is also a respected environmental academic, and a committed and inspirational educator and communicator, with extensive experience of environmental practice and policy; she also has a long and continuing association with SSHoP, having delivered the second of the Society's highly successful series of Annual Photographer's Lectures. The journal issue project rapidly outgrew the original idea due to the wealth of material by a wide range of international contributors, both artist-photographers and environmental writers, revealed by Patricia's research.

One concept, among the many significant topics discussed in the book – that of ‘how to present what is unseen’ – has a particularly powerful resonance for me. Patricia Macdonald refers to this in her Introductory essay where she quotes extensively from Rob Nixon's ground-breaking book Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor.