Description

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Surveying the Anthropocene collates a range of approaches to image making concerning environmental issues by some of the best artist-photographers working worldwide. The incisive input to environmental questions is gathered together at a pivotal moment in the evolving human relationship with our home planet.
Photographic approaches to environmental imagery have altered fundamentally in recent decades, largely as a result of increasing socio-ecological awareness. This insightful international survey, with a strong representation from Scotland, considers the varied range of current working practices of a representative selection of artist-photographers, both renowned and emerging, whose image-making explores human-caused environmental change. It concentrates particularly on work which relates to the types of impact, on climate and the web of life, that are sufficiently significant and globally widespread to appear in the future record of the rocks as a new geological epoch - the Anthropocene.
The concept of the Anthropocene has engaged the attention and imagination of a wide range of commentators from very different backgrounds and walks of life. It therefore provides an excellent context in which to discuss, in an open and cross-disciplinary way, the range of responses of artist-photographers and cultural writers to our present global situation of multiple, interconnected environmental and social crises - and the options for human ingenuity in addressing these.

About the Author

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Patricia Macdonald BSc PhD FRSE FSA (Scot) FRSA HonFRSGS HonFICS is an environmental / cultural-landscape researcher, writer and academic (since 2004 Honorary Fellow, University of Edinburgh & Edinburgh College of Art) and an award-winning artist-photographer whose powerful, boundary-crossing environmental aerial imagery - made in collaboration with her partner Professor Angus Macdonald of the University of Edinburgh - is commissioned, exhibited and published internationally, spanning fine-art and editorial contexts. She is the author / co-author of ten books / catalogues, including Shadow of Heaven (1989); Order & Chaos (1990); Views of Gaia (1992); Once in Europa / Einst in Europa (1999/2000, with John Berger); Airworks (2001); and The Hebrides: An Aerial View of a Cultural Landscape (2010, with Angus Macdonald).