Borderlands and Political Ecology: a photographic exploration of the environment, territories, boundaries and power near the imaginary line of the equator.

While this project is about the environment, it is also very much about photography and my relationship with it over 40 years. I have been a photographer (of one sort or another) my entire adult life, but in the last 10 years I have become more introspective, and I turned away from commercial photography to immerse myself in higher education, starting with film studies, and for the last six years, fine art. I am deeply interested in photography, how it works, what it does, how it can persuade and become part of activism, and how photography can influence or change peoples’ minds or behaviours, as I hope it has changed mine.

As a fourth year undergraduate my work focused on the no​ man’s land on the border between South Africa and its neighbours. No man’s land is defined by the Collins Dictionary (2007) as “land between boundaries, especially an unoccupied zone between opposing forces” (“No man’s land” n.d. online). For one particular shoot I attached a 4×5 field camera to a railing on the Beit Road Bridge between South Africa and Zimbabwe to photograph from a bird’s eye view. My intention was to create a series of photographs from border fence to border fence. On the third day of shooting I witnessed a Zimbabwean man below, crossing illegally from Zimbabwe into South Africa. My camera was set up on the left tributary of the Limpopo River. I loaded a film slide and waited for the moment the man would enter the frame. Like the man crossing illegally from Zimbabwe to South Africa, my queer sexual identity would have similarly caused me to become illegal had I entered Zimbabwe. While my sexual identity is not prominent in the current body of work, it was nonetheless a profound moment for me as I realised the significance of border lines across the planet and how meanings are created and enforced on either side of these hypothetical lines. The Limpopo is a colonial-era boundary that even in the present separated and defined both of our existences, a single imagined boundary line that determined our constitutional rights, and in this moment I realized that this “imaginary” line confronted my sexuality, space and embodiment (Halberstam, 2005: 15). This moment led to my acknowledgement that the imaginary lines of crossing a border “is not only a ‘national signifier’ but is space of internal markers of potential insight and change” (Nuttall, 2005: 221). This experience made me aware of the longitude and latitude of my location as I moved into my MFA project, in which I photographed near the equator. Along this imaginary line, I considered the politics and histories that surrounded these ecological spaces.

Figure 1: Amazonas, Nova Olinda do Norte 3.53185°S, 59.0540°W, 2018.

This has led to various sections of South African society remaining misogynistic, racist, xenophobic and homophobic (Nuttall, 2005: 219). In an essay on xenophobia, Bronwyn Harris (2002: 169­184) reminds us that in 1994 South Africa became a new nation; “this ‘new South Africa’ represents a fundamental shift in the social, political and geographical landscapes of the past.” Segregation has been replaced by unity, “equality has replaced legislated racism and democracy has replaced apartheid, at least in terms of the law” (Harris, 2002: 169­184). Despite the transition from authoritarian rule to democracy, prejudice and violence continue to mark contemporary South Africa. This shift in political power has brought about a range of new discriminatory practices and victims. My investigation into borders and imagined barriers highlights the fact that South African land has been subjugated to political and gendered myth making through the historical subjugation of women, the LGBTQI+ community and the ‘Foreigner’, a person who crosses a South African border legally or illegally (Harris, 2002: 169­184). Emergent alongside a new­nation discourse, the ‘Foreigner’ stands as an ideological construct in which racism and violent practice are produced. In terms of my work, I see the ‘Foreigner’ as representative of the ‘Other’; as part of the race, gender, sexuality and class counterargument against patriarchal hegemony.

The exhibition, entitled no man’s land, consists of six photographic collections using large format analogue film, a video piece that was shot on 8/16mm film and a limited edition book. Through engagement with queer theory and my own visual texts, the exhibition explores controlled spaces with a focus on the gendered queer/economic border, the colonial/ideological border, the humanitarian border and the imagined/metaphoric border. The significant purpose of the work is to expose the contours of metronormativity by analysing the historical and ideological control of South African land. The ‘metaphoric border’ was termed by the Latina essayist Gloria Anzaldúa as a way to define “places that are safe and unsafe, to distinguish us from them” (Arriola, 2002). Anzaldúa’s (1987) writings in the groundbreaking work Borderlands/La Frontera, share the “pain­filled lessons of border crossings based on race, gender, sexuality, and class.” With exceptional insight, Anzaldúa (1987) is concerned with the marginal person: “a person, like herself, who exists in a state of transition, of ambivalence, of conflict; someone who is infused with many cultures yet cannot claim a single one wholly for herself.” Anzaldua’s text resonates with me as I consider myself to be a marginal person in South Africa in the sense that I grew up in many cultures with a gay sexual identity. no man’s land is an attempt to understand my existential or metaphysical relationship to South African land and space; it is my attempt to become part of its history.

patrol rwanda virunga, 2017
0.0502°S, 29.5143°E hahnemuhle potorag baryta 80×100 cm ed 3 ap II

For several years I have been photographing primary hardwood forests[1] along the line of the equator, the illusory line on the sphere’s surface, dividing the earth into northern and southern hemispheres. The line of the equator has geographic significance but no material quality; as a physical mark it exists on maps, where it may appear as a line in red or black dividing the Earth in two. The land this line intersects seems almost as random as the divisions made by the lines between countries and people during the colonial era of boundary creation.

[1] “An old-growth forest, also termed primary forest, virgin forest, primeval forest, late seral forest, or (in Great Britain) ancient woodland, is a forest that has attained great age without significant disturbance and thereby exhibits unique ecological features classified as a climax community” (White & Lloyd, 1994: n.d. online). While the word forest conjures up a smaller and more singular sense than the word “jungle”, I use “primary hardwood forest” instead of “jungle” because the latter may be problematic through its association with colonial myths.

Figure 3: Alan Cohen, Improbable Boundaries (Equator at Mitad del Mundo), 1999.

But what really drew me to this line, this equator, were the forests. The images in this project were taken in three areas that circle the equator: Southeast Asia, Africa and South America, where over half the world’s rainforests are concentrated and which I visited in order to follow the line and the forests along it. Due to geographical and border restrictions, I did not follow the line of the equator exactly and initially concentrated on photographing the as yet unspoiled aspects of the forests. As I walked further down the equator, I felt the encroachment of human presence in the natural environment, felt the destruction more keenly, as landscapes disappeared due to human “progress” and “development”. This project traces the histories and politics of the current devastation and the imminent habitat destruction that is yet to come.

I want my photographs to communicate, persuade and warn of the continued ecological destruction occurring along this line. My plan was on the one hand to capture arcadian visions of the equatorial hardwood primary forests before they are destroyed (an act of documentation and advocacy even) and, on the other, to show how this arcadian vision is disrupted by a more dystopian one.

Line is an attempt to understand the current pressures on equatorial environments in order to create a photographic exploration of ecology that highlights and foregrounds land, space, territories, boundaries and power. This exploration considers the lines of national borders, the borders of national parks, reserves and protected areas and the political ecology of the equatorial primary hardwood forests.

Figure 4: Richard Mosse, Weeping Song, 2012. Digital c print.

My work is an investigation into the entanglement of this history in the present and of “how imagined boundaries emerge and are articulated, spatio-political domains, what boundedness is, and how power moves from and into the land” (Nuttall, 2005: 225). Travelling along the line of the equator made me realise that the environmental problems in the post and neo colonial equatorial zones of Africa, Asia and South America are similar and interlinked. The political ecology of each equatorial zone shares different yet similar colonial legacies that have led to the current problems of neoliberal exploitation and deforestation. These countries, “with emerging economies, some with poor governance and corruption often have poor environmental policies that multinational companies use to their advantage” (Kabemba, 2013: n.d. online). In almost every tropical rainforest, “capitalism, neoliberalism, industrialization, contract secrecy, mining, tax evasion, transfer pricing, corruption, clear cut logging, urban sprawl and destruction” (Kabemba, 2013: n.d. online) are, and were, evident in various forms. Foreign investor syndicates “consciously engaged in ‘shape shifting’ [using supply chains] leaving it unclear who is responsible for the economic, human and environmental consequences” (Gewald & Soeters, 2010: 159). The neoliberal strategies of multinational companies have allowed for an unknown and undocumented situation in which forests were, and still are, literally disappearing. In the documentary film Jane (2017), Jane Goodall asks, “How is that the most intellectual being on this planet is destroying its own home?” This remark from the British primatologist and anthropologist reverberated in my mind as I observed the conditions of the equatorial zones behind the curtain of trees. These spaces were very difficult to access, often only accessible via logging roads, leaving every primary forest fragmented or confined inside the borders of militarised national parks. Over time I heard more stories from environmentalists of land concessions, subsistence farming, illegal logging and poaching. I began to feel a deep uneasiness, a combination of ignorance, helplessness and confusion. I began to use the equator as an imaginary guiding line along which to analyse this ecological destruction. To this end, my field of study and research considers political ecology[2] through the lens of photography

[2] According to Peet and Watts (1996:6) “Political ecology is the study of the relationships between political, economic and social factors with environmental issues and changes. Political ecology differs from apolitical ecological studies by politicizing environmental issues and phenomena”. Peet and Watts (1996: 6) continues to explain that “the academic discipline offers wide-ranging studies integrating ecological social sciences with political economy in topics such as degradation and marginalization, environmental conflict, conservation and control, and environmental identities and social movements.” Robbins (2004: 14) argues that the term political ecology insists on “environmental matters of concern as inextricable from social, political, and economic forces”,

“Landscape is a way of seeing that has its own history, but a history that can be understood only as a part of a wider history of economy and society; that has its own assumptions and consequences, but assumptions and consequences whose origins and implications extend well beyond the use and perception of land.” (Cosgrove, 1998: 2-3) (my emphasis)
“The eyes of the intruders saw the forests as primeval and empty” (Hecht & Cockburn, 1989: 30), and therefore open for the taking.

To understand the destruction of the equatorial environments, land and territories that I visited I needed to unpack the history and vectors of power that had allowed such destruction to take place. On reflection I recognized that, as Stephen Ingold (2007: 1) writes “the effect of boundary creation, through lines drawn on maps, affected how the earth has been divided.” Ingold (2007: 2) continues that “colonialism is not the imposition of linearity upon a nonlinear world, but the imposition of one kind of line on another” that converts “the paths along which life is lived into boundaries in which it is contained” (Ingold, 2007: 2-3). Simply put, lines are a symbol of control, captivation and absorption and not of reality except for the reality that humans have declared themselves as the owners of certain geographical zones through the imaginary lines they have created (Ingold, 2007: 85). The aftermaths of colonialism have revealed some of the dire environmental consequences caused by these border lines to the topography they control.

The destruction of the hardwood forests and the politics of ecology are a direct effect of differences “that go back to the beginning of human exceptionalism and colonial rule” (Neumann, 2002: 15). In 1637, René Descartes declared that:
“Instead of this speculative philosophy taught in the schools, we may thus discover a practical philosophy whereby we could know the force and actions of … all the bodies in our environment … so as to make ourselves as it were the masters and possessors of nature.” [my emphasis].
Ever since the Enlightenment, Western philosophers, such as René Descartes, Francis Bacon (1561–1626) and François-Marie d’Arouet (1694–1778) (better known by his pen name, Voltaire) have shown us a nature that is controlled, “universal and grand but also mechanical and passive” (Tsing, 2015: VII). Nature was seen as a resource for “the moral intentionality of man, which could tame and master nature” (Tsing, 2015: VII), and the Enlightenment principles of “Cartesian dualism conceptually divided human and nonhuman worlds into separate domains of reality, situating the nonhuman world as passive and objectified” (Adams & Mulligan, 2003: 24). This conceptual divide and disconnect meant that in essence Europeans “rationalized the colonization of nature” (Adams & Mulligan, 2003: 24).

Colonial propaganda and ideology utilized the visual in the form of sermons, poetry, books, maps, printmaking, paintings and later photography promoting “the idea of an ‘uncivilised’ and ‘empty’ world to be conquered” (Hochschild, 1999: 310), contributing to “an idealized and exoticized nature that had been colonized in concept as well in practice” (Demos, 2016: 8). A key part of the colonial vision was to depict empty landscapes and to portray indigenous people as “uncivilised” and in need of “progress” and “development”. Once colonial practice had become visualised and justified in the mind, an insidious and multifarious “pattern of bureaucratic rationalization, scientific and technological mastery” (2016: 8) could take place through military domination. This domination was deployed through the establishment and control of a legal system that could in turn “expand the capitalist economy in order to manage and maximise the possibilities of resource extraction” (Demos, 2016: 8). As Demos (2016: 14) writes “Ecology was far from the innocent discipline named; rather, it compromised the science of the empire.” [my emphasis].

Fifteen years before colonial settlement in southern Africa’s cape Descartes (1652) used the words “mastery and possessors” of nature. In 1866 Ernst Haeckel, a German biologist, used the term ecology, “which designated the body of knowledge concerning the economy of nature; the investigation of the total relations of the animal both to its organic and inorganic environment” (Hughes, 2009: 7). Already we see a shift from mastery to economy. Colonialism’s true intent is signalled in the words “the economy of nature”. Thus the notion of “ecology was formed at the height of European colonialism” (Demos, 2016: 14).

Marx suggests that “European industrial capital sought to secure markets by force, by the colonial system” (Lorraine, 1989), which was motivated by the search for raw commodities and fertile agricultural soil that were essential to the work and support of the Industrial Revolution. In the colonial mind “Nature” (land, biomes, plants and animals) was to be used, possessed, exploited, structured and mastered for European economic benefit – “the very essence of modernist thinking drove colonial exploitation which was capitalistic in its intent” (Demos, 2016: 14).

In an article on necropolitics[3], Achille Mbembe (2003: 26) considers colonial occupation itself as a matter of “seizing, delimiting and asserting control over a physical geographical area; of writing on the ground a new set of social and spatial relations”. New lines were written on the ground as territories were created. Mbembe (2003: 26) perceives “territorialisation as actualised through the production of boundaries and hierarchies, zones and enclaves; the classification of people according to different categories; and, finally, the manufacturing of a large reservoir of cultural imaginaries.” These categories and imaginaries give different rights to different people within the same territories; colonialism introduced new borders and different conceptions of race, religion and gender that determined people’s relationships to each other and to the land.

^[3] Defining necropolitics, Mbembe (2003: 11) writes that the “ultimate expression of sovereignty resides, to a large degree, in the power and the capacity to dictate who may live and who must die. Hence, to kill or to allow to live constitute the limits of sovereignty, its fundamental attributes. To exercise sovereignty is to exercise control over mortality and to define life as the deployment and manifestation of power.”

Figure 5: Henrik Håkansson, Fallen Forest, 2006. Recreated in 2010, 2011.

Colonialism, with its imperialistic intent, is defined by “appropriation and mastery.” Decolonising nature, Demos (2016: 202) explains, “is to cancel the subject-object relationship between humans and the environment”; to remove the early philosophy of Descartes’ “mastery and possession” and “acknowledge the multiple levels of colonial violence in order to envision an alternative world” (Demos, 2016: 202). Decolonising nature addresses the long history of exploitative capitalist intent in order to understand new ways of going forward (Demos, 2017: 7). The dream of modernisation was that all people might benefit from progress, but instead it has become a story of destruction and, over the centuries, the colonial mindset of “mastering and possessing nature” has rendered the future of human life fragile and unstable (Tsing, 2015: VII). Anthropologist Anna Tsing notes that “we are in a new state of thinking and imagining the contours of a strange new world” (Tsing, 2015: 3).

Figure 7: Hans Haacke, Rhein Wasseraufbereitungsanlage (Rhine Water purification plant), 1972. Installation. This installation explores the conceptual divisions between society, nature and environmental destruction and is intended to alert us to the problems of organizing society and nature in an urban setting.

Competitive capitalism has resulted in “smaller firms and industries being replaced by monopolies” (Lorraine, 1989). Exploitation of the land, which could be termed a neocolonialism, continues, as multinational corporations protect themselves with neoliberal strategies. “Extractionist oligarchical hegemonies have positioned themselves politically (through economic incentives) in developing nations in order to extract mineral and raw commodities” (Hecht & Cockburn, 1989: 128), leading to a struggle in the equatorial zones of Africa, Asia and South America over who controls territory, land and forests. Development and progress become multibranched systems of “agrarian politicians, transnational corporations, governmental organizations, development agents, local settlers and timber dealers” (Nygren, 2000: 809). These diverse social actors regard primary forests as suppliers for hardwood, mineral and pharmaceutical extraction.

The Fate of the Forest, by Susanna Hecht and Alexander Cockburn, addresses the political ecology and deforestation of the Amazon and suggests that “indigenous tribes, rubber tappers, placer miners and land settlers are the victims of much broader and ravenous forces at work in the forest” (1989: 128). In the 1960s “extractionist oligarchies, the speculators and ranchers claimed the lower areas of the Amazon” (Hecht & Cockburn, 1989: 129). Decades later, this “progress” was compounded by international corporations that bought land for mineral extraction and oil (Hecht & Cockburn, 1989: 130). In the Amazon, I witnessed first-hand the fragmented forests encroached upon by large scale cash crops and saw the slash and burn policies that are used to claim land. The price of progress and development in the Amazon has resulted in “a combination of burned forests, annihilated species, degraded lands, poisoned rivers and toxic soils” (Hecht & Cockburn, 1989: 130).

The loss and degradation of natural habitats I witnessed plays out like a war of attrition. In these equatorial zones there is an “abandonment of power creating a void where legislation is incoherent and ambiguous” (Lawson & MacFoul, 2010: XIII). The only untouched primary forests left were in national parks and inaccessible landscapes such as mountains and gorges. I witnessed the total destruction of equatorial forests in Indonesia, Borneo and the Philippines and felt driven to understand the neoliberal capitalist model that enabled it, discovering that supply chains were the capital model used to deforest these countries which are now used globally. Supply chains require low wage labour and raw resources to make products that are shipped to “benefit dominant firms” (Tsing, 2015: 61).

Tsing (2015: 113-114) first learned about Japanese supply chains by studying logging in Indonesia, explaining that Japan went through a building boom in the 70s, 80s and 90s which was to turn their economy into one of the world’s richest; to construct their buildings in cement they needed plywood for construction molds (Tsing, 2015: 113). As Japan didn’t have enough hardwoods, the Japanese looked to the East Asia forests of the Philippines, Malaysia and Indonesia, using supply chains to carry out their business interests which offered “loans, technical assistance, and trade agreements to firms from other countries, which cut logs to Japanese specifications” (Tsing, 2015: 114). Japanese[4] imported hardwoods eventually depleted the Philippines and Malaysia Borneo. They then set their sights on Indonesia Borneo and other islands in the archipelago. The traders knew to avoid political risk by using Chinese subcontractors and brought in Filipino and Malaysian loggers (Tsing, 2015: 113-114). “The supply-chain arrangements facilitated Japanese trade standards while ignoring environmental consequences” (Tsing, 2015: 113), and the traders used shape shifting techniques listing their companies under a grab bag of Indionesian pseudonyms while absorbing the trees into their economy (Tsing, 2015: 114). In actuality no Japanese people entered or cut down any Indonesian forests as it was all done for them (Tsing, 2015: 115).

The tropical primary hardwood forests of Southeast Asia have been devastated. Supply chains are now a global norm, and what happened is Asia has also happened, and is happening, in Central Africa and South America. Moreover, “the wholesale, interconnected, and seemingly unstoppable ruination of forests are across the world such that even the most geographical, biological and culturally disparate forests are still linked in a chain of destruction and encroachment” (Tsing, 2015: 212) [my emphasis]. These global histories of industrial ruin contain similarities that cannot and must not be denied.

[4] Tsing (2015: 114) explains that, “Supply-chain arrangements accommodated illegal logging as a layer of subcontracting, which harvested trees protected by environmental regulations. Illegal loggers sold their logs to the larger contractors, who passed them onto Japan.” “In short, Japanese trading companies made the logging of Southeast Asia possible … Deforestation was sponsored by Japanese trading companies put into place by Southeast Asian military force” (Tsing, 2015: 115).

Figure 8: Tue Greenfort, Exceeding 2 Degrees, 2007. An exploration of supply chains in which a thermohygrograph is placed on a table made of Malaysian wood, then fabricated in Japan and sold as a product in Dubai. The temperature of the museum was raised by 2° and the savings of air conditioning were used to buy an area of the Ecuadorian rainforest.

Figure 9: Subhankar Banerjee, Brant and Snow Geese with Chicks, 2006. From the series Oil and the Geese.

Figure 10: Pieter Hugo, Aissah Salifu, 2010. Agbogbloshie Market, Accra, Ghana. In this body of work Hugo depicts a man-made hell of global technological waste raked over for valuable metals by the poorest residents of Accra.

Moreover, the vast plantations of monocropping that I travelled through to reach the fragmented national parks were a significant form of forest destruction and encroachment. Tsing (2015: 39) explains, “Plantations craft self contained, interchangeable project elements, as follows: exterminate local people and plants; prepare now­ empty, unclaimed land; and bring in exotic and isolated labor and crops for production.” Tsing notes that, “like a giant bulldozer, capitalism appears to flatten the world to its specifications” (2015: 61) [my emphasis].

Only a few have benefitted. The resulting inequality, created by “brute capitalism”, is staggering and the problem is that progress, mastery and possession have stopped making sense – if they ever did. According to a recent Oxfam report (in Elliott, 2019), the world’s richest eighty people own as much as the Earth’s Global South population combined (about 3.5 billion people), just as around ninety corporations are responsible for running the fossil fuel economy, and a much smaller number of governments is accountable for the “geopolitical and humanitarian wars that camouflage control of the world’s natural resources and energy supplies” (Demos, 2016: 17). We are “being held hostage to corporate powers that place short-term profits over long term sustainability” (Demos, 2016: 9), and the capitalistic intent and commodification of nature has pushed the Earth into an irreparable state “unknown in human experience” (Barnosky et al., 2012: 52). I learned that in the equatorial biomes, environmental degradation is merely “an ‘externality’, a cost that falls outside of entrepreneurial calculation, and one that regards the destruction of a forest (or other resources) as merely the price of progress” (Hecht & Cockburn, 1989: 96). If it can be argued that the conservation of tropical forests “as a source of water, botanical knowledge, carbon, habitats of biodiversity and pharmaceuticals” (White, 2010: 34) is essential to multispecies health and existence, then it also can be argued that illegal deforestation is an “ecocide” and “environmental crime” that “deserves the attention of lawyers, policy makers and criminologists” (White, 2010: 34). The promises of industrial transformation have been betrayed by damaged livelihoods and lost landscapes.

Figure 11: Amy Balkin, Public Smog over Los Angeles, 2004. A hypothetical clean air park in the atmosphere, one whose location, dimensions, and duration are contingent on the contracts of the emission credits purchased by the artist.

Figure 12: The Harrisons, Survival Piece V: Portable Orchard, 1972. Recreated in 2015 at the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis.

Figure 13: David Arnold, Yellowstone NP, 1875. National Geographic Staff Photographer. Yellowstone National Park used in National Geographic to promote the expansion of the park

Photography in the 1860s was considered by explorers to be a necessary part of an expedition, although photographic equipment of the time was cumbersome, and building dark rooms in harsh environments was difficult. Its was extremely difficult to “fix” an image onto emulsion plates or glass early in the early history of photography. On an expedition to Victoria Falls, the photographer James Chapman joined forces with the painter Thomas Baines (Livingstone & Withers, 2005: 216), and the only photograph that he managed to capture and fix in the humid climate was Baobab, Victoria Falls, c1862. Moisture from the falls and the humid climate made it impossible to develop an image and, as his role was to document the falls themselves, meant that he failed in his primary objective. However, the explorers discovered an abundance of game, water, hardwoods and minerals, as exemplified in Baines’, Buffalo Driven to the Edge of Chasm opposite Garden Island Victoria Falls, (c1865), in which an Eden devoid of human life is fecund with natural opportunities and invites exploitation by future colonists

Ansel Adams influenced this project in that he was both a photographer and a part-time activist for the preservation of pristine biomes (Turnage,1992). I was also influenced by contemporary German photographers who have redefined conceptual photography, especially in regards to the landscape. The work of Andreas Gursky, Thomas Ruff, Thomas Struth and Wolfgang Tillmanss has been critical to my understanding of contemporary photography and photographic curation, and I explore the handling of the medium and how these artists stage the encounter with their work in terms of curatorship and method.

Gursky, Ruff and Struth are the subject of concerted art historical and art theoretical investigation, a development epitomised in Michael Fried’s 2018 Why Photography Matters as Art as Never Before. After Jeff Wall, Ruff was a pioneer in a new way of curating or presenting the enlarged photograph, which in turn influenced how Gursky approached his work; the aspect ratio of scale leads to an immersion into the photographic image that confronts the viewer with the micro and macro.

Gursky (1998) describes his early work as “interrelated micro and macrostructures woven together that allow the viewer to recognise the hinges that hold the system together.” In Swimming Pool, Ratingen (1987) the viewer is removed from the image and the proceedings it depicts (Gursky, Fotografien 1984-1998, exh. Cat.). The charged space between the viewer and the image has also been extensively investigated by Thomas Struth 1998 Paradise series “taken between 1998 and 2001 in forests in China, Japan, Australia, and German Bavaria, demonstrating the appeal in recent fine art photography of the strategy of exclusion” (Fried, 2008: 300), a strategy that presents no figures and no horizon, with the viewer shut out by the entanglement of foliage.

In terms of photographic tools, I chose to work mainly with a large-format camera, which had its advantages and disadvantages. My photography combines romantic, realistic and documentary elements in varying degrees, and many years ago, when I first embarked on this project, I used a large-format in homage to Ansel Adams’ quest to preserve the environment (or at least to record it) before it was destroyed and in homage to the print quality of his work. I later reflected that there was something curious about using an anachronistic large-format camera in our contemporary times. However, this equipment is also used extensively by contemporary photographers such as Andreas Gusky, Thomas Struth and David Goldblatt.

Modes of curation and display can create meaning and direct focus to warnings about ecological deforestation (Ault, 2008: 15). In this exhibition, I consider the contour of the equator as a guiding line of latitude, reflected in a thin grey line on the exhibition wall (except in the projection room). The grey of this line is based on a lighter version of the photographic grey card that is used with a spotmeter by photographers to determine a good exposure on analogue film, and is halfway between pure black and pure white. The painted line leads the viewer through different spaces and into the main gallery, and photographs are placed on, above or below the line to reflect my proximity to the equator. Several images I hand printed, with the balance digitally printed in four sizes. The photographs are mounted on aluminum di bond and are not covered by glass, so there is no barrier between the image and the viewer.

As the viewer enters the gallery they are confronted by an infrared satellite image of urban sprawl and agricultural land division in the Bolivian Amazon. Beneath this is the title of the exhibition: LINE. The painted grey line draws the viewer into the first room, which displays handmade, fibre-based analogue prints of landscapes, two of which are of a moving river in the Amazon shot with a long exposure. This sets up the expectation that the exhibition as a whole will be quite pictorial, but subtle disruptions already allude to other possibilities – such as photographs of Roman numerals I to X that were carved into a stone boulder in the middle of an Amazonian forest, and an image of a weathered cement relief sculpture of trees and mountains.

In the passage that leads out of this space are idyllic arcadian images, complex, hyperreal photographs of vines and dense foliage that offer no sense of scale or horizon. The landscapes pictured no longer exist: on returning to the same four sites in central Africa and Indonesia in which I photographed these images, I discovered that they had all been cleared, logged or destroyed. Through their placement and curatorial grouping, the images of dense foliage give way to what cannot immediately be seen behind the curtain of trees: human encroachment, destruction and environmental degradation.

After many years of walking the line of the equator, I have witnessed destruction and learned much about subjects I would never otherwise have considered, including fine art, film making, business supply chains, anthropology, political ecology, creative eclogy, queer ecology, environmental activism and so much more. I have learned that art is a political act and that the ecocide of nature must be re-evaluated and decolonised. We are living in a system that promotes an excess we do not need and that is destroying our ecosystems and our future.

Creative ecology, a discipline named by anthropologist and art historian T.J. Demos (2016: 13), is about using art as a form of social activism and political action. Demos (2016: 11) believes that “In our current political world, we are observing contemporary activist and artistic practices that address environmental conflict and justice in new ways.” He suggests that …

“Broadcast media, experimental film, photography, video, internet-based and independent news, creative activism, NGO’s, documentaries and collective social movements form a complex political aesthetic field that contest the dominant hierarchies and anti-democratic environmental arrangements” (Demos, 2016: 10-11).

Using social media, social movements are countering the ecocide of our environment by holding governmental policy makers and corporate globalisation accountable “via creative engagements and activism with visual media” (Marcus, 1996: 6). Art can be the result of the multidisciplinary collaborations of civil society that lead to political mobilisation (Demos, 2016) and, “given its long history of experimentation, imaginative invention, and radical thinking, art can play a central transformative role to counter corporate and governmental positions” (Marcus, 1996: 6). Through conceptual experimentation and action, artists can help change public opinion (through exhibition, performance, theatre, publication, film, literature and social media) (Demos, 2016: 20).

Creative ecology is a new way of thinking about social injustice, where visual culture can be linked to the politics of ecology in creative ways. Deforestation is inextricably linked to climate change, which is in turn its own political crisis. The artist can be an organizer combating extreme forms of ecological destruction. Demos (2016: 8) believes that “diverse actors are building environmental movements with diverse forms of solidarity; a form of political composition turned into artistic practice that connects with social movements.” A creative philosophical and perceptual shift is required to combat “the destructive traditions of colonizing nature” (Demos, 2016: 19).

Government must tell the truth by declaring a climate and ecological emergency, working with other institutions to communicate the urgency for change.

Government must act now to halt biodiversity loss and reduce greenhouse gas emissions to net zero by 2025.

Government must create and be led by the decisions of a Citizens’ Assembly on climate and ecological justice (Extinction Rebellion, n.d. online).

The idea that art can play a pivotal role in ecology might seem ridiculous, until one witnesses the creative protest performed by Extinction Rebellion and how the visuals they employ are critical to attracting public attention When asked “how one artist (person) can make a difference?” Demos (2017: 19) answers “Don’t be one: join/connect through solidarity.” Activism is about each person contributing, creating awareness and raising critical rationality through connection and political organisation.

Visual culture can connect art with the politics of ecology through documentation, publication, social media and exhibition to generate dialogue with “modern discourses allowing for the potential emergence of novel concepts” (Demos, 2016: 25), artistic activism and collective learning, which can lead to policy change and the political will to vote for a concerted response to climate change. I want my photographs to communicate, persuade and warn of the continued ecological destruction occurring along the equator and use future exhibitions as a point of critical discussion. The visual, in the form of films, documentaries, photography, social media, the internet has alerted the public to what is occurring to the planet’s ecology. Fine art as a political act is grounded in human relations and their social contexts, which in turn can stimulate participation from viewers at a fundamental and personal level. This fundamental participation will help raise our collective critical consciousness for environmental protection and action.

We have failed as the “masters and possessors of nature” (Descartes,1637), and as Demos (2016: 16) states, we need a “project of imagination that rescues nature from corporate control, financialization and propriety exploitations of biogenetic capitalism.” Forests are being erased and new climate realities are already profoundly affecting the planet and our place on it. The political and cultural ramifications of climate justice can be addressed through media discourse and national dialogue as we enter our sixth mass extinction, having lost contact with nature in our subconscious and our way of living. We must speak to the foundations of our structure about a collective global crisis that requires collective action and movement as “decolonizing nature entails transcending human-centered exceptionalism, no longer placing ourselves at the center of the universe and viewing nature as a source of endless bounty” (Demos, 2016: 19). Moreover, fossil fuel companies and plastic bottling multinationals have green-washed their image using lobbying and marketing to suggest that they are affecting change (Harris, 2019). We are out of options, and this is a monumental existential crisis and moral and ethical turning point in the history of our planet (Harris, 2019); a rise of between 2° and 3° will render the planet uninhabitable (Harris, 2019).

By drawing attention to a space that seems unremarkable, photography can encourage us to see what the photographer saw, to shed light on an issue or space that might not otherwise be remarked upon. The photograph, as a visual document, has the ability “to signify elements of absence, erasure, nostalgia and memory” (Enwezor, 2008). In capturing light and fixing an image, the transient medium of photography freezes a moment in time and relates to, or signifies the mutability of ecology (Sontag,1973:14), prompting Susan Sontag (1973:14) to remind us that “to take a photograph is to participate in another person’s (or things) mortality, vulnerability, mutability. Precisely by slicing out this moment and freezing it, all photographs testify to time’s​ relentless melt​.” Over my years spent on this project I have witnessed “time’s​ relentless melt” and can bear witness to​ the vulnerability of nature. My photographs serve as a warning, raising awareness of environmental destruction in the equatorial environments, caused by our so-called civilisation. I, too, am implicated in “slicing out this moment and freezing it”, and it is with regret that I realise that, I too, am hastening nature’s mortality. As I cross from youth to older age I am conscious of my own mortality and vulnerability and realise the line, like life, does have an end (Ingold, 2007: 170).

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Figure 1: Amazonas, Nova Olinda do Norte 3.53185°S, 59.0540°W, 2018.

Figure 2: no man’s land, 2017. Fiber Print. Size: 400×500 mm.

Figure 3: Alan Cohen, Improbable Boundaries (Equator at Mitad del Mundo),1999.

Figure 4: Richard Mosse, Weeping Song, 2012. Digital c print,

Figure 5: Henrik Håkansson, Fallen Forest, 2006. Recreated in 2010, 2011.

Figure 6: Andreas Gursky, Nha Trang, Vietnam, 2004. Chromogenic process print. 295×207 cm.

Figure 7: Hans Haacke, Rhein Wasseraufbereitungsanlage (Rhine Water Purification Plant), 1972. Installation.

Figure 8: Tue Greenfort, Exceeding 2 Degrees, 2007.

Figure 9: Subhankar Banerjee, Brant and Snow Geese with Chicks, 2006. From the series Oil and the Geese.

Figure 10: Pieter Hugo, Aissah Salifu, 2010. Agbogbloshie Market, Accra, Ghana.

Figure 11: Amy Balkin, Public Smog over Los Angeles, 2004.

Figure 12: The Harrisons, Survival Piece V: Portable Orchard,1972. Exhibited at the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis 2015.

Figure 13: David Arnold, Yellowstone NP, 1875. National Geographic Staff Photographer.. Figure 14: Thomas Baines, Buffalo Driven to the Edge of Chasm opposite Garden Island Victoria Falls, c1865.

Figure 15: James Chapman, Baobab, Victoria Falls, c1862.

Figure 16: Albert Bierstadt, Looking Down Yosemite Valley, 1865.

Figure 17: Carleton Watkins, View of the Tutokanula Pass, Yosemite, c1878-1881.

Figure 18: Eadweard Mybridge, Clouds Rest, Valley of the Yosemite (No.40), 1872.

Figure 19: Ansel Adams, Yosemite Valley, (Winter), c 1935. Yosemite National Park, California.

Figure 20: Andreas Gursky, Swimming Pool, Ratingen, 1987. Chromogenic process print. 107.5×131 cm.

Figure 21: Thomas Struth, Paradise 6, 1998. Daintree, Australia. 2×3 m.

Figure 22: Fabrice Monteiro, Untitled #1 from The Prophecy, 2013.

Figure 23: Edward Burtynsky, Oxford Tire Pile #5 Westley, California, 1999.

Figure 24: Bright Ugochukwu Eke, Rippes and Storm I, 2011. (detail). Plastic water bottles and wire. Variable.

Figure 25: El Anatsui, Bleeding Takari II, 2013. MOMA.

Figure 26: Guy Tillim, Opunohu, Roti, Cook’s Bay, 2010. (diptych).

Figure 27: Guy Tillim, Haapiti, Moorea, 2010.

Figure 28: Guy Tillim, L: Guard at the state mine, Mbuji-Mayi R; Independent diamond miners and the holes they have dug, 2004.

Figure 29: Guy Tillim, Leopold and Mobutu Series, L: Statue of a miner; R: The gold mines at Bunia. 2004.

Figure 30: Wolfgang Tillman, Retrospective, 2017. Installation view at Tate Modern.

Figure 31: Wolfgang Tillman, Retrospective, 2017. Installation view at Tate Modern.

Figure 32: Andreas Gursky, Salerno, 1990. Chromogenic process print. 188 x 226 cm.

Figure 33: Stephen Gills, Talking with Ants, 2013.

Figure 34: Border between Rwanda, Virunga National Park 0.0502° S , 29.5143° E and Democratic Republic of the Congo, Volcanoes National Park 1.2859° S , 29.3159° E, 2019.

Figure 35: Kasango, Democratic Republic of the Congo 4.643601 S, 26.362312 E, 2019.

Figure 36: Photographer unknown, The Dakota Access Pipeline Protests, 2016.

Figure 37: Ylenia Gostoli, Extinction Rebellion, 2019. Al Jazeera.Protesters marched from the Houses of Parliament down Whitehall.

Figure 38: Minerva Cuevas, Del Montte, 2003. Acrylic paint on wall, a black and white research scheme on paper and 100 relabeled tomato cans.

Figure 39: Satellite Infrared Color, Urban Sprawl and Destruction of Bolivian Amazon.

14° 04′ 24.00″ S 66° 47′ 22.19″ W. 2018. Image downloaded from internet.

Figure 40: Andreas Gursky, Amazon, 2016.

Without Trees [deforestation and the ironic need for growth]: – an essay by Warrick Sony – on the theory behind the sound piece he created.

“Even the earth is dizzy

Even the clouds are coughing

Even the leaves are wheezing

Earthbeats, Earthbeats”

All over the world countries are measured, like plants, in terms of their growth. Have the branches of our economy withered or are “green shoots” visible with future hopes of wealth? Do we put down roots or do we transplant ourselves to more fertile areas?

Investopedia describes “green shoots” as :

A term used to describe signs of economic recovery or positive data during an economic downturn. The term green shoots is a reference to plant growth and recovery, and has been used during down economies to describe signs of similar growth.

The plant/nature metaphor is ubiquitous in business and economics: Is Apple better than Blackberry or Orange or is the best Cloud storage system called Rain… and do they sell space on Amazon. Is ‘growth’, then, good for planet Earth and inevitably for us as a species?

Without Trees, through a series of aerial photos and film, depicts economic growth in a different light: human economic growth-activity and development are seen as an injurious scar tissue, where roads cut and buildings fester; red earth wounds; all culminating in cancerous sores over large swathes of the Earth’s surface.

The beginning picture-edits are punctuated by drops of rain. These grow and develop in pace and density, eventually superseded by the tapping of a computer keyboard.

The tapping keyboard takes control: it manages rain manipulation, automated irrigation, conveyor belts and stone crushing machinery. Most aspects of economic growth are automated, computerised and ultimately controlled by the tapping of a keyboard. This, then, is the primary sound in many industrialised human lives; the tap, tap, tap of the computer keyboard. It is moving money, playing games, buying stocks, building roads, bringing development to poorer nations. This is human progress and it is rewarded by wealth. For a few, immense wealth, for some even exceeding the gross GDP of some small countries.

Success is rewarded, also, with accolades and applause. So, the next sound to morph from the keyboard is a hand-clap. Applause is the ancient cultural ritual of bringing two hands together to make a loud sound. The hand clapping, therefore, takes over from the keyboard and, though initially applause, a different clapping becomes evident. A morphing from applause to ritual clapping begins to underscore a presence of the human-ancient; lost (or killed) civilisations, the performance of ancient traditional ritual as we (humans) seek the extinct, or the un-understandable, the non-logical. We need this to fill the psychological hole left behind by the death of god and the rise of the industrial paradigm and the new religions of Freud, Marx, Darwin and Nietzsche.

The present new noise of home brewed ceremonies and dross meanings and incantations and rhythm brings us to the Earth – beat generation of new age rituals, chants and magical thinking that inevitably cannot bring new shoots or new leaves to the already too late destruction. The machine is churning faster and faster and we cannot hear above the human babble or the traffic noise or the air-conditioner or the washing-machine.

The Washing-Machine.

This is the audio carpet that holds the room together (as Jeff Bridges famously quips in the Big Lebowski (1998)) and spin-dries us off into oblivion. It provides not only atmosphere—when pitch-shifted down—but also the critical sound edit-points that transition the viewer from static to moving picture—via the important OFF-ON switch. The washing-machine also gives us the mundane energy and tempo-surge as we rush headlong, money belts spinning into a speeding blur of sound and image—to the final OFF position.

The Sound Elements:

Drops of water/ Some low frequencies and metal hits I made for ‘The Mangler’ Tobe Hooper.1995/

Washing-machines/ Air Conditioner/ Tropical rain/ Night atmosphere forest/ City ambience from far/

Human babble/ Computer keyboard tapping/ Fragments of voices from a movie I mixed for Wits University/

Hand claps and finger snaps.

A sincere and a special thank you to Svea Josephy, Associate Professor – Photography UCT. My supervisor who has helped me at every turn. Without Svea this project would not have been possible and I am indebted to her wise counsel, writing skills, editing skills and critique. Svea gave me all of her time without monetary gain and without reason. All my best is because of you.

Thank you to the Michaelis School of Fine Art.

A sincere thank you to the University of Cape Town for their financial support and awarding me the following scholarships and grants:

Humanities Faculty Research Committee: Humanities Completion Grant 2019.

Maclver Scholarship 2018-2019.

Jules Kramer Scholarship 2018.

UCT Council Honours Merit Scholarship 2018.

This project would not have been possible without the financial and critical support of Michael Tierney from The Tierney Fellowship. The Fellowship was created in 2003 by the Tierney Family Foundation to support emerging artists in the field of photography. The primary goal of the Fellowship is to find tomorrow’s distinguished artists and leaders in the world of photography and assist them in overcoming the challenges that a photographer faces at the beginning of his or her career. I was honoured to have received this fellowship in 2018. The money from this award was essential to cover travel, film and printing costs.