The Anthropocene Project is a multidisciplinary body of work combining fine art photography, film, virtual reality, augmented reality, and scientific research to investigate human influence on the state, dynamic, and future of the Earth.
The Anthropocene Epoch is when human activity started to have a significant impact on the planet’s climate and ecosystems using a unit of geologic time, used to describe the most recent period in Earth’s history. So, basically when humans had an effect on the earth’s nature and shows the negative impact humans had on it.
Mind map/Mood board:
What are some of the issues explored?
Some issues explored in Anthropocene photography are that it mainly focuses on humanity which believes that humans are responsible for everything that happened towards nature and the environment, such as fossil fuels making the air more polluted which is worse for our lungs and animals. Another example would be how much plastic there is in the sea which is due to humans littering and it ending up in the sea, then fish, birds and other sea animals would end up eating this plastic we deposited and then would end up dying and/or when we catch the fish and cut them up to eat, we can see all the plastic they have eaten in their body.
Are the Photos Beautiful?
Some of the photos we see from Anthropocene photographers are very stunning to look at ascetically of the big distances or landmarks like mountain ranges or fields/rivers. But, a lot of the photos they take are not helping the bad ecosystems or climate change, but they are spreading awareness for other people to react and start fixing the world.
Do you think that these photographers are solving the problem?
These photographers are not aiming to solve the problem of the litter in the ocean and animals and any other problems humans have done. But, what they are trying to achieve, is to spread the awareness of the litter and show normal people who may be the reason for the littering how bad it is and what it actually does to animals and the earth. Also, shows their way of caring for the animals and planet by showcasing all the negatives towards the public.
Anthropocene simply describes the time where humans had a substantial impact on the earth. The effects of human activities on Earth can be seen for example in biodiversity loss and climate change. Many people would link this with the effects of climate change as the warming of our atmosphere, air and oceans caused by using fossil fuels which are created by humans. However, it is not just this. It also focusses on the effects on the Earth’s geology, landscape, climate, limnology and ecosystems. Carbon dioxide emissions, global warming, ocean acidification, habitat destruction, extinction and widescale natural resource extraction are all signs that we have significantly modified our planet.
An early concept for the Anthropocene was the Noosphere by Vladimir Vernadsky, who in 1938 wrote of “scientific thought as a geological force”
Many people believe Anthropocene came about at different times of the human life. many people think that it began at the start of Britain’s Industrial Revolution in the eighteenth century which then started the world’s first fossil fuel economy. However, other people believe it came out far earlier, when humans began to farm. Even more people suggest it dawned in 1950 when nuclear weapons projected radioactive elements into the worlds atmosphere, affecting the nature as well.
Plastic could become a key marker of Anthropocene. The earth is filled with plastic and plastic can be used for many things. since plastic is not biodegradable, it means it ends up littering soils and oceans beds. There is already evidence that suggests that plastic pollution has already made its way into fossil record. as well as this, a 2019 study showed that plastic deposits have been rising since the 1940s. Overall, plastic pollution is a vert large factor that contributes to the problems of the earth and scientists are studying to find out if it is a golden spike and a signifier to Anthropocene.
How and why are photographers exploring Anthropocene?
As photography is known for sharing beauties of the planet and where we live, it is a very popular topic that many people enjoy to observe or even be a part of. Due to it being interesting to many, it can also act as a factor that can project awareness onto others by displaying it in a way people would be drawn to and enjoy. Using photography for a subject such as Anthropocene will have a great impact on the way people view the effects of pollution and climate change as photography has a way of zooming in on small detailed factors as well as the larger picture of things. This may urge people to do things different even if its a small amount everyone collectively does as photography will make people notice the brutal impact we have on our planet.
I chose my favourite images that I took at Harve Des Par flagged them and then highlighted green the ones I wanted to edit.
This image is of Harve Des Par is a lamp post with the pool in the background. This image was originally in colour but I changed it to black and white. It was a cloudy day when this photo was taken so the lighting was adjusted using the camera settings. The lamp post looks misplaced in the image as the settings around doesn’t match it making it look outlandish and singular. I turned up the texture, clarity and dehaze for detail and depth in the image
This image is of the flats and houses at La Colette. For this picture I angled the camera towards the flats with some more flats and houses towards the front half of the image. On the houses there is a Harve Des Par sign. I like this in the image as it shows the location where the image was taken and adds detail to the image. I changed the original image to black and white and turned down the temperature and tint for a colder image. I turned the exposure and contrast up for more dimension and turned up texture and clarity for more detail in the buildings.
Peter Mitchell (born 1943) is a British documentary photographer, known for documenting Leeds and the surrounding area for more than 40 years. Mitchell’s photographs have been published in three monographs of his own. His work was exhibited at Impressions Gallery in 1979, and nearly thirty years later was included in major survey exhibitions throughout the UK including at Tate Britain and Media Space in London, and the National Science and Media Museum in Bradford. Mitchell’s work is held in the permanent collections of the Royal Photographic Society and Leeds Art Gallery.
MOODBOARD
In 1979 Impressions Gallery showed his work A New Refutation of the Viking 4 Space Mission, the pictures showed the traditional urban landscape presented on a background of space charts, the concept being that an alien has landed from Mars and is wandering around Leeds with a degree of surprise and puzzle. Martin Parr described this show as ground-breaking.
Martin Parr is a British documentary photographer, photojournalist and photobook collector. He is known for his photographic projects that take an intimate, satirical and anthropological look at aspects of modern life, in particular documenting the social classes of England, and more broadly the wealth of the Western world.
About& Lifestyle
Peter Mitchell was born in Eccles, near Manchester, in 1943. Shortly afterwards his family moved to Catford, south-east London, where Mitchell spent his formative years. Even in his youth mitchell was a keen collector and diarist, beginning the archive that would later form part of his autobiographical publication Some Thing Means Everything to Somebody.
Leaving school at 16, Mitchell moved to Hampstead heath and began training as a cartographic draughtsman with the civil service where he learned to make architectural maps and drawings, an interest he has maintained, most notably in the self-published Memento Mori.
By 24, Mitchell was seeking new challenges and won at place at Hornsea College of Art where his interest in photography and typography developed.
Peter’s first solo exhibition of 1975, entitled An Impression of the Yorkshire City of Leeds, was funded by the Yorkshire Arts Association and Arts Council of Great Britain formed a part of Leeds’ contribution to the European Architectural year.
It was a success, with the curator encouraging Mitchell to focus on his photography over his screen-printing practice. The 1970s was a key time for photography in Britain, seeing photographers such as Martin Parr and Tom Wood rise to prominence, and Mitchell’s practice was bouyed by this national cultural interest.
He would walk everywhere, taking note of the places he passed, returning later with his camera, ladder and tripod to photograph them.
These walks regularly took him through the Quarry Hill estate in the centre of Leeds, but he had never photographed it, until the first signs of demolition appeared. The demolition of the ill-fated development provided Mitchell with the perfect subject matter to explore his interest in urban regeneration against the backdrop of Thatcher’s Britain.
The redevelopment of Leeds progressed at a lightning pace in this period, Mitchell would photograph a shop front or row of houses one week, only for them to disappear the next.
Mitchell’s work remained resolutely personal, seeking out the people and places of local interest rather than seeking to reveal any great and gritty truth of 1980s British life to a wider audience.
My Analysis
As shown, Mitchell photographs everyday factors you see in the city e.g Leeds and Manchester. This is quite unusual from an outsiders perspective as most photographers are ultimately famous for taking ‘ aesthetically pleasing’ or ‘ beautiful’ according to the human eye, however Mitchell does not glamourize the reality and viewers seem to like it. Each image is differentiated through a variety of themes, however they all portray an old, vintage aesthetic. This is in an interesting and significant factor as by first look you assume that they are not edited which creates a realistic factor to it as well as the vintage aesthetic. This makes you question, what is making it give off this aesthetic. In my opinion, it is the images of the brick buildings and old looking churches through the surroundings and the state it is in. The reason of this, is in this generation the world is becoming more modern day by day. This links to this image.
As shown, Mitchell photographed this brick building with a more modernized and larger building behind it to create contrast. This shows the change in human activity and trends which ultimately relates to the Anthropocene and Robert Adams in the way of contrasting two large factors to one another.
In each image he does not edit the images such as the weather to glamorize it. Within his images, he is using photography to photograph the normality and reality of his lifestyle and possibly even old images to create archives of around the city to then compare and forecast future trends and see how much human activity can impact the earth, such as these images.
Clearly, the typical cinema has changed and become modernized through generations and I assume these houses could be getting taken down possibly for new things. Although people may be living there which creates a sense of inhumanity which significantly links to the Anthropocene as Mitchell is using photography to express the inhumanity on earth and how it is increasing. This links in a different way through how humans leave a large carbon footprint causing climate change but humans doing little about it which could be a sense of inhumane.
MY PHOTOSHOOT PLAN
My plan to relate my work to the Anthropocene and Peter Mitchell is to take images of everyday scenes such as shops and even the cinema. My intention and aim to make some images look old and vintage and compare it to more modernized things such as the typical cinema nowadays and buildings.
The Anthropocene is a proposed geological epoch dating from the commencement of significant human impact on Earth until now. It affects Earth’s geology, landscape, limnology, ecosystems and climate. The Anthropocene Epoch is an unofficial unit of geologic time, used to describe the most recent period in Earth’s history when human activity started to have a significant impact on the planet’s climate and ecosystems.
In simple terms, it is how human activity impacts the earth.
Mood Board:
The word Anthropocene comes from the Greek terms for human (‘anthropo’) and new (‘cene’), but its definition is controversial. It was coined in the 1980s, then popularised in 2000 by atmospheric chemist Paul J Crutzen and diatom researcher Eugene F Stoermer. The Earth is approximately 4.5 billion years old while humans have been here for a much smaller scale, yet irreversible influence has taken place on biodiversity and nature, fundamentally altering the Earth’s physical, chemical and biological code. In the last 60 years, the Great Acceleration has began. This is a term used for the increasing rate at which human impacts are unfolding at an unprecedented scale and speed, causing the globe to deteriorate and become more modified, spiralling downwards. Being the most influential species of the planet, human behaviour has created a snowball effect of significant impacts not only for other ecosystems or species but ourselves too. Just a few of these are:
Extinction
Habitat destruction
An increase in extremeness and frequency of severe weather conditions e.g earthquakes, tornados and storms
Carbon dioxide emissions
Global warming
Ocean acidification
To accelerated and irreversible global warming, the Anthropocene may coincide with the rise of the modern environmental movement, as a new geological age that has displaced the Holocene of the last 10,000 to 12,000 years. Human beings have become an emerging geological force that affects the future of the Earth. The dramatic changes in the correspondence of humans and the environment. Beginning with the Industrial Revolution, the late 1940s and early 1950s, the strong impact of Contemporary Society, the rise of capitalism, the colonization of the world, and the era of fossil fuels. The geologist, Thomas Jenkyn spoke of anthropozoic rocks, the geologist Pavlov used it to refer to a new geological period in which humanity was the main cause of planetary geological change, later Paul Crutzen (Nobel Prize in Chemistry) gave popularity to the term Anthropocene.
Just over twenty years ago, scientists introduced a term to denote a new geological epoch in which human activity has had a marked impact on the global climate: the Anthropocene. Since that time, the concept of the Anthropocene has been exposed to a wider public audience through expanding environmental studies and scholarship, increasing coverage in the popular press, widespread and fervent activism, and a variety of artistic responses. Second Nature: Photography in the Age of the Anthropocene is the first major exhibition to examine the Anthropocene through the lens of contemporary photography. Comprised of 45 photo-based artists working in a variety of artistic methods from studios and sites across the globe, Second Nature explores the complexities of this proposed new age.
Since it’s emergence, the term Anthropocene been adopted by disciplines outside of the sciences including philosophy, economics, sociology, geography, and anthropology, effectively linking the Anthropocene to nearly every aspect of post-industrial life. Organized around four thematic sections, “Reconfiguring Nature,” “Toxic Sublime,” “Inhumane Geographies,” and “Envisioning Tomorrow,” the exhibition proposes that the Anthropocene is not one singular narrative, but rather a diverse and complex web of relationships between and among humanity, industry, and ecology.
Ultimately, the theme of Anthropocene also links to the project of Poaches hunting down elephants and killing them as easy access to their tusks. Elephant’s tusks are burnt for the pure purpose of Ivory, which comes from the tusks and is considered very valuable. Because of the high price of ivory, poachers illegally sell their tusks. Tens of thousands of elephants are killed each year for their tusks, and as a result, elephant populations have declined rapidly.
I took 273 photos all around Harvey Des Par, I plan to eliminate and then edit these, and take more photos in other places. After I went through with them I was left with 72 images.
These were my favourites out of this shoot.
Photoshoot 2:
I took around 82 photos and wen through and selected 26 that are the best, and my favourite to then edit.
The main idea to this photoshoot was to get photos from all different landscapes in the island showing our nature, like beaches, harbours, woods, railway, and cliff paths. Then you had to edit you photos inspired by Ansel Adams and other Case studies picked. A very important factor was contrast and them being grey and white. I liked my photos i enjoyed taking photos of landscapes (not as much as portraits) but found it not very free, like not many things i could do with my photos, i love some edited ones like my last virtual gallery and first one was some of my favourites, and going around jersey to take photos was gorgeous. I like all my photos and think if you looked and mine and Ansel Adams they are similar and well edited and just generally well taken in the first place, if I was to criticize them I would say it isn’t my best work as i feel they aren’t exciting and don’t stand out enough and didn’t do enough photoshoots in the first place, so ended up with not enough final pieces, I also didn’t find editing it very fun and feel like it doesn’t show my best work as they aren’t edited in the absolute best way and are still showing, all too similar of colours and not enough contrast and scale of 1-10 of shades. I think from this I could only improve and if the topic was more open to how you wanted to edit it I would have had more fun with it, but I do think my photos are good and show very well what we were meant to be and I would definitely like them if they were in a gallery. I do believe I tried hard with this topic and still came out with good outcomes that relate well to Ansel Adams and show some good work and improvement and skill of the topic.
One of my Case studies was Ansel Adams, my photos aren’t exactly similar settings to his as we don’t have places like that in jersey but I took photos in outdoor landscapes and edited them in similar ways to him.
These are images that Ansel Adams took that I used as inspiration, because they show very clearly what Ansel Adams was trying to achieve with contrast, even when in black and white.
These are a few of my images that I think are similar.
I picked these images to compare as they have similarities to Ansel Adams, not only did I do my best trying to get similar locations, like the rocks, and having a similar sunshine, in one of the picks, the main similarity though is that they are all coloured black and white, and the contrast, Adam Ansel would take a photo and look at what he wanted to see so all he had to do was change the sheet to red to bring out a different, effect and show the world what you couldn’t see just looking at the mountains, and it would change the whole photo when making one part black and another part white but with also 8 other shades in-between.
I did another artist study on a photographer names fay Goodwin, I mainly used photos of hers as inspo but kept along the lines of Ansel editing because I found her photos were more similar to my locations I had in jersey.
