Referral: Object & Body

For my referral of the Object Brief I have looked into environmental issues of all sorts but specifically deforestation and forest fires, two similar but also different issues. I chose these because last summer there were forest fires very close to my house in Mallorca, thought to be caused by the intense heat, that burnt hundreds of square meters worth of forest and also came very close to my home.

Forest Fire in Costa d'en Blanes

I have researched into the causes of deforestation, forest fires being just one of them, including human expansion of suburban cities, logging, population growth and commercial agriculture. I have also researched the deforestation occurring in the Amazon Rainforest. I found out that the Earth has lost from 415,000 to 587,000 square kilometers worth of trees since 2006, most of it from the Amazon. Then I researched all of the effects, local and global, that this deforestation caused, such as worsening of atmospheric conditions, the soil, biodiversity and the economic impact.

I then moved on to photographers and artists that did work related to deforestation. I found a spanish photographer by the name Daniel Beltrà who calls himself a conservation photographer. He has three projects: "Rainforest" dealing with the deforestation in the Amazon and various other countries; "Oil" dealing with the oil spill in the Mexican Gulf; and "Water" visualising the melting of the icecaps and the separation of the poles. Out all of these the one I focused most on was "Rainforest". It crosses several styles (landscapes, portraits and still life). He normally travels on a helicopter to take landscapes of the devastation of the natural landscape. His work is a way for him to criticise the human effect on nature and to shock people into action to change and stop this. His use of dramatic scenery is a clear reference to this and also a way of trying to change people's mind towards the way they treat nature, to sensitise them and also to make them think.

Another photographer I have looked at is Edgar Martins in particular his series "The Rehearsal of Space". A series depicting the aftermath of the immense forest fires that occurred in Portugal in 2005 & 2006.
I think John Beardsley explained Edgar Martin's work best in is book " Topologies of Place":


"It is hard to believe that representation of ruin could be so seductive- this is especially true of those photographs shot along the creek, where the vivid greens of vegetation are just being invaded by flame, which drips off the riverbank and is reflected in the water. In those photographs where the fire is more advanced, Martins achieves rich atmospheric effects. Thick haze focuses our attention on the foreground, as in the shot of a pair of pine trunks rising out of the ferns and set against scrim of smoke. As in the more monochromatic Iceland pictures, atmospheric conditions have a pronounced effect on pictorial space. Only a couple of images have any suggestion of spatial depth- in one, we are looking up a blackened valley; in another, a road disappears into the smoke. The rest are foreshortened, focusing our attention on the qualities of line, the tonalities of smoke, the colors of flame. Martins’ intentions in these images were not only pictorial, of course; there is a contemporary anxiety to them as well. Portugal’s 2005/2006 fires were the result of extended drought and extreme; many believed them to be an expression of global climate change. Moreover, they could be seen as evidence of environmental mismanagement: much of the forest was eucalyptus, a fast-growing but extremely flammable tree that is frequently planted in reforestation projects. Martins was in search of the story as much as pictorial effects in these images of fire. There is tantalizing convergence of subject and medium in these smoky photographs. They both portray and are made possible by one material suspended in another: their subject is suspended in carbon; their medium photographic emulsion. Martins went to considerable effort to capture these images: he completed a residency and training with fire fighters in Portalegre before being allowed to work in the field with them, and he coordinated his work with the National Fire Protection Unit. This effort, he recounts, was expressive of commitment he generally makes to the “sites, places and people” he photographs. In the case of the Portugal Fires, it enabled him to work close-up to the flames, using a still wider-angled lens than he typically uses. Proximity to fire resulted in a technical accident that accounts in part for the quality of the images: in extreme close-ups of the flames, the film was fogged by exposure to intense heat, which reinforces the atmospheric quality of the smoke. In a sense, the subject became the medium here— the heat is presented as much as re-presented; it enacted a technical transformation that was encoded in the film itself."

Next I researched Robert Adams "Turning Back" series. A series about the deforestation occurring in the North-West of the United States of America. He considers it a grim journey starting on the eastern coast and traveling through and industrial forest and ends in a small town in the deserts of Oregon. He depicts it as a way of him saying "It's not over". He is a huge defender of trees and natural environments, seen here in the following quote extracted from an Interview he did:
"So, if you haven’t loved a tree enough (if not to hug it, at least to want to walk up to it and touch it as if you’re touching a profound mystery)—if that experience has eluded you—I feel bad for you because you’re not going to live a happy life."

Finally I looked at Nick Moir, an experienced Fire Photographer who shot the record-breaking bush fires in Australia in 2009. After Australia's most prolonged drought on record, its bushland was at heightened risk of burning during the fire season. A combination of high temperatures and strong winds in the October to December summer months resulted in intense, fast-moving conflagrations. Some were started by arsonists. Huge fires on the land surrounding outer suburbs of Sydney, and later also the capital Canberra, destroyed property and homes. Rough terrain, thick bushland and eucalyptus forests often hampered fire-fighting operations. The fires destroyed everything it touched: woodland, houses, animals, even humans perished cause of the fires. Nick said that even that he has seen many fires, the scale of these and the scale of destruction was hard to comprehend. All of this is reflected in his work. The sense of destruction is clearly evident in his work.