At first glance
Photojournalist's beautiful scenes reveal ugly truth about Earth
 |
| Jim Detjen is a professor and director of the Knight Center for Environmental Journalism at Michigan State University. He is the founding president of the Society of Environmental Journalists and was president of the International Federation of Environmental Journalists from 1994 to 2000. |
Outside the Natural History Museum in London, an open-air exhibition of more than 150 giant photographs is on display. The photos are stunning in their beauty. They show scenes of the Earth, its landscapes and its people taken from a helicopter 100 to 10,000 feet above the planet.
The photos were taken by Yann Arthus-Bertrand, a French photojournalist, as part of a remarkable and extremely-popular exhibit, known as “Earth from the Air.” Since 1990, Arthus-Bertrand has taken hundreds of thousands of aerial photos in an effort to create an ongoing visual record of the “state of the planet.”
Much as photographs taken of Earth by astronauts in the 1960s are said to have changed the way people perceived the planet, Arthus-Bertrand’s powerful photos are doing so today.
How so?
First, the beautiful patterns, rhythms, contours and contrasts in the photos draw in viewers. Scenes of a caravan of camels crossing the Sahara Desert, a colorful tapestry of quilts covering the ground in Morocco or a flock of scarlet ibis gliding over a river delta in Venezuela are visually captivating, almost hypnotic in their beauty.
Often, upon viewing one of Arthus-Bertrand’s photos, a viewer is left wondering, “What is that?” — and is drawn in to read the photo’s caption.
When that happens, he has captured you, much like a spider luring you into his web. For when viewers read the captions they are frequently surprised and sometimes shocked by the environmental significance of the image.
For example, one photo shows a wintry scene of a city containing snow-covered high-rise apartment buildings. It’s only when viewers read the text that they realize they are looking at the abandoned city of Pripiat, Ukraine. The Chernobyl nuclear power plant accident of 1986 caused the city of 50,000 people to be evacuated; 17 years later it is still a radioactive no man’s land. Seeing a photo of an enormous abandoned city brings home the impact in a way that tens of thousands of words cannot.
Another photo shows a half dozen empty fishing vessels stranded in what appears to be a wide panorama of mud stretching far to the horizon. It’s only when readers examine the description that they realize they are looking at the dried up Aral Sea in Kazakhstan. Once the fourth largest inland body of water in the world, this massive lake has lost three-quarters of its volume of water because of a disastrously misguided plan to irrigate cotton crops with water from the lake.
 |
The image, part of the "Earth from the Air" exhibition, shows a heart shapre in a mangrove swamp in New Caledonia, France. More photos can be viewed at the exhibition Web site, www.earthfromtheair.com. Photo by Yann Arthus-Bertrand/Impact Photos |
A third shows a group of people, apparently vacationers, relaxing serenely in a naturally-heated blue lagoon in Iceland. But when readers analyze the caption, they find out that “the average tourist uses as much water in 24 hours as a thirdworld villager uses in 100 days.”
Not all of Arthus-Bertrand’s images are linked to environmental problems.
Many are simply beautiful, capturing scenes of wildlife or natural panoramas. And some show positive efforts that are being undertaken around the planet.
Arthus-Bertrand, 57, has been interested in nature his entire life. He discovered the beauty of the planet from the air while photographing lions from a hot air balloon floating above Kenya during the 1970s. Later he founded a firm specializing in aerial photography.
His books have been published in more than 20 languages; The Earth from the Air (Thames & Hudson), has sold more than 1.5 million copies worldwide since it was first published in 1999.
At many journalism schools, there is a strong emphasis on the importance of investigative reporting and powerful writing. But photojournalism is also a powerful tool. A number of prominent photojournalists, such as W. Eugene Smith, have used photographs to document environmental catastrophes, such as mercury pollution in Minamata, Japan.
Arthus-Bertrand follows in the footsteps of Smith. His photos use the power of the visual image to tell a compelling story about the state of our planet at the beginning of the 21st Century.
 |
||
|
