Full marks to the Canadian High Commission in London for organising a photographic exhibition on climate change. Fewer marks for the actual show.
The problem is finding photographs that illustrate the phenomenon: photos are a static moment in time, climate change is a process over time.
Captions are necessary. But in this show even the captions don’t do the job.
The exhibition title is A Global Challenge: how communities in four continents are responding to climate change. That’s unequivocal: it says, ‘Change is underway, and people are responding to it.’
But look at the caption: “Grape growers in some vineyard-friendly parts of the world such as California’s Sonoma County may have to find varieties suited to higher temperatures.” That’s not a community responding: that’s postulating a possibility.
Another caption states: “In Tanzania, office workers and field staff coordinate efforts to resolve water access problems in the Pangani River Basin.” It may be true, but water access is an issue in parts of Tanzania even without rising temperatures.
“A leopard seal periscopes out of the water, eying a tourist Zodiac,” says another, over a delightful photograph. “Playful and curious, leopard seals have been known to bite the Zodiacs.” Presumably, is global warming causing the biting?
“Even in midsummer, the cold is never far away. Grise Fiord elder Raynee Flaherty sews mitts in the window light.” Nice picture – but it doesn’t illustrate climate change.
Neither does another dramatic image: “Dwarfed by rock, snow and the frigid waters of the Ross Sea, an Antarctic research station clings to the edges of the continent.”
Some of the words on the walls do relate to the exhibition title – “the ice is… increasingly unreliable”; “In 2007, the [glacial] runoff didn’t fill the hamlet’s reservoir”; “Earth’s climate has been heating up and the impacts of warming are being felt globally.”
But too often even such references to community response are not explained. The visitor gets little sense that change is likely to be far-reaching and immensely disruptive or of the actions and plans that some communities are already taking.
Climate sceptics will not be impressed, and visitors who know that change is real will want more than pretty pictures and vague words. Despite Canada's drive to exploit its vast oil sands (said to be enough oil to meet the country’s current energy needs for 500 years), its geographic size and features put it in a strong position to assess and pass on information about some of the effects of global warming. To do so requires a more rigorous approach than this exhibition offers.
It’s an opportunity missed.
* A Global Change: How communities in four continents are responding to climate change - A selection of images by some of the world’s leading nature photographers drawn from a collaborative publishing project by African Geographic, Australian Geographic, Canadian Geographic, Geographical (UK) and New Zealand Geographic. , Canada House, Trafalgar Square, SW1. Open 10am-5.30pm weekdays until November 14. Info: 7258 6421/ culture.london@international.gc.ca |