Climate Change and the Image

Climate Week NYC, 2025

Climate Change and the Image ? 

David Campany

None of us doubt how vital images have been for raising awareness around climate change. There is no doubt, either, how important images have been for climate-related protest and activism.

What we do have doubts about, however, is exactly what kinds of image are effective. If we knew, we’d just get on with it and make them, right? But the way images “work” (if that’s even the right word) is not so straightforward. Here, I’ll try to break down why this is, what it might mean for us, and what we can do about it.

First of all, visual culture is never constant. It is always mutating – at different rhythms, in many directions. What resonates with some audiences at some moments, can be lost on others. Context is not everything – but it’s a lot.

Secondly, images do not carry meaning the way a truck carries coal. They can certainly feel more immediate than words, and even jump language barriers, but at root they are ambiguous things. They can show, or even provoke, but they cannot explain. They are imprecise, for better or worse.

Thirdly, there is really no metric for the effect or impact of images. True, the mass media likes to venerate certain images for having changed mass opinion, but most of the time those media outlets are doing self-promotion, patting themselves on the back for being important. In the previous century, when media were dominated by fewer outlets, certain images could be elevated through repetition to the status of “icons”. Today, our media landscape is much more fractured, and it may be no bad thing that an issue both as simple and as complex as climate change has produced no iconic images, certainly not in that older 20^th century sense.

Fourthly, images ‘behave’ unexpectedly. They can take on unforeseen significance and effects. This can be quite unsettling, particularly for image-makers who feel they ought to be able to control and predict the outcome of their efforts.

I think of the poet Diane di Prima:

NO ONE WAY WORKS. It will take all of us shoving at the thing from all sides to bring it down. (‘Revolutionary Poem #8’)

In other words, the collective spirit is in the shoving, not in the sides, and exactly when or how things will be brought down will be unpredictable.

Shoving from all sides means being creative in our thinking and in our imagery.  Not for the sake of being “arty”, but because there is no clear path. No tried and tested way. No everlasting methods to follow. Knowing one’s audience and context can help, but do not rule out not knowing. “There’s a crack, a crack in everything,” sung Leonard Cohen, “that’s how the light gets in.”

I am the Creative Director of the International Center of Photography, here in New York. Our current exhibition is Edward Burtynsky: the Great Acceleration, a survey of over four decades of photography by one of the great chroniclers of the late industrial era. Oil use. Water use. Mining and quarrying. Food production. Manufacturing, waste and recycling. Farm and forest management. With many exhibitions, books and documentaries about his work, it is hard to think of a photographer with a greater reach or influence. And yet, what strikes me most about his photographs is not any campaigning spirit, but their clear-sighted and level-headed observation. Burtynsky thinks more in terms of revelation than accusation, and understands that his photography does not stand alone but will be fitted, haphazardly, into broad and wide conversations about geopolitics, consumer-capitalism, labor markets and, yes – climate activism.

An exhibition might get great reviews, great attendance, and positive public feedback, but change can also come from inviting those one or two policy makers with more surgical influence. This is something I learned working with the British photographer Mark Neville.  He had made an incredible book – half photos and half science reporting – titled Deeds Not Words. It’s about a small English town where the hasty clear-up of toxic steel industry land led to dust in the air, causing a large cluster of birth defects in new-born babies. Neville distributed the book to hundreds of local environmental health agencies, hoping to change the way such land is cleared. Nothing happened. Zero response. I then helped Neville make an exhibition in London, presenting the images and scientific information. The public loved it, but crucially we organised a meeting in the galleries for health officers and a key politician. The politician took their findings to the government and national policy was changed. A win!

But what can we learn for this? Make a book that fails, rescue it with a show, and then hope that the one person with influence sees it and does the right thing? Make just one book and get it into the right hands?

As I’ve said, there are no formulas to what we do. We have to be idealistic and hopeful, but we also have to be pragmatic, responsive, adaptable and speculative. Mass influence can be important and effective but so can quiet, focused influence. I suspect “awareness” of climate change has reached a high plateau with the general public. While we need to be extremely vigilant in order to keep it there, it is policy change that is going to make the difference.

Commissioned by Climate Week NYC and first published here.