Regarding the Changing Climate - Sontag's theories related to environmental art

After exploring the topic of beauty and tragedy in depth throughout my research, I'd like to put the focus back on my practice by analysing how my project work thus far relates to the explored theories.

While essayists like Susan Sontag make a strong case to use imagery of shock over beauty to create a deeper effect, artists like Mosses and Salgado specialise in the use of beauty to reach their audience on a more intellectual level. 

According to Sontag in 'Regarding the pain of others' in which she addresses the use of shock imagery to reach audiences and the general historic development of war photography. 

Throughout her essays in 'Regarding the pain of others' Sontag focuses her argumentation on historic war photographs to prove her point, and it can be largely agreed upon that parts of her argumentation are still relevant in the contemporary field. Her investigation into the use of shock imagery and conclusion as an effective tool has been proven correct, however the described loss of effect noticeable in 2003 has intensified in the past years resulting in the use of beauty over tragedy in modern day fine-art photography. 

In 'Atrocities' Sontag investigates the use of beauty in a different form stating that an image of war can never be described as beautiful as it reveals too much horror. And while a 'landscape of devastation is still a landscape' (p.60) it is hard to look past the war and find beauty in a scene of tragedy. 

In recent contemporary photographic works, both Salgado and Mosses however focused on Using Beauty to catch the viewers attention and in turn the audience fascinated by the images and doesn't expect a negative story which results in them being more open to the whole situation when the tragedy is finally revealed. 

The deeper level of conflict Fine Art images are able to visualise over pure documentary photography is described by Mosses as the Key to creating a longer lasting effect as the mages of beauty reaches past the blatant trauma of shock.

Looking at environmental photography instead of war documentary for my personal project, images are not used for shock and to just gain attention but rather to educate and cause long term behavioural changes. In environmental art, it appears that artists are no longer using shock to raise awareness, but rather beauty to give hope. 

Contemporary fine art photographs today use beauty to reach an audience oversaturated after seeing too much tragedy. For my own practice I'd like to take on these realisations and create an educative series based on natural beauty threatened by rising sea levels and environmental changes. 

Instead of showing the future in ruins and destruction caused by the rising seas, I plan to show Auckland as part of an underwater world. While the topic is serious, I hope to capture attention first by showing the underwater world as a beautiful yet foreign concept. The longer the viewer then spends looking at each individual piece of art, the more tragic it will appear. 

However due to the amount of time already invested in understanding the art works, audiences will remember aspects more clearly and feel more personally engaged with the images. By including some fact based images in the first part fo the series, i further plan to educate viewers taking inspiration form Christ Jordans artworks on plastic waste in the United States. While for Jordan aesthetics are secondary to scientific fact, my series however will use beauty first to then explain the science behind the visual. 

Edmund Burke explained in 'A philosophical enquiry into the origin of our ideas of the sublime and beautiful.' that both the sublime and the beautiful have their use within the field of visual arts. While some artists focus on the sublime and others on the beautiful, I'd like to consider both for my work and create a series to visually communicate the threat of climate change.