1st Edition

Photography, Ecology and Historical Change in the Anthropocene Activating Archives

By Bergit Arends Copyright 2025
190 Pages 8 Color & 31 B/W Illustrations
by Routledge

190 Pages 8 Color & 31 B/W Illustrations
by Routledge

190 Pages 8 Color & 31 B/W Illustrations
by Routledge

Moving beyond existing scholarship, this book connects photography, archives, ecology and historical change and critically applies the Anthropocene as framework to the in-depth study of artists’ projects. It discards single modes of seeing environmental transformations in favour of a multiple and de-centred environmental imagination. Bergit Arends uses multidisciplinary perspectives to view... Read more

Introduction   1. Photography, Ecology and Archives in the Anthropocene: De-centring Environmental Imagination  2. Archival Metabolisms: Landscape Transformations in Nguyen the Thuc Kohle unter Magdeborn [Coal underneath Magdeborn] (1978) and Christiane Eisler (2014)  3. Re-activating the Sir Edward James Salisbury Photographic Archive of Ecological Images (ca. 1905–1938): Chrystel Lebas Field Studies (2011–)  4. A Yard of Jungle (1992/1915) and ‘My Jungle Table’ (1923) Re-performed: Naturalist William Beebe and Artist Mark Dion  5. Beyond the Plantation Archive: Performing Lives Through Photography in Joy Gregory and Philip Miller Seeds of Empire (2021) and Hans Sloane A Voyage . . . to Jamaica (1687/1688)  Coda

Biography

Bergit Arends is British Academy Postdoctoral Research Fellow at The Courtauld Institute of Art.

“Arends ticks all the boxes in this fresh, innovative, and multi-disciplinary approach to photography and the Anthropocene. Timely, relevant, and insightful, Photography, Ecology and Historical Change in the Anthropocene employs a broadened perspective on archives to demonstrate the power of contemporary artists to address the pressing environmental issues of our times.”

 

-- Joan M. Schwartz, Queen’s University, Canada

"By reconceiving the archive as a living, relational and performative site, Arends offers a powerful argument for the role of contemporary art in both critiquing and reimagining the environmental crises of our time."

-- Science Museum Group Journal