group show 68
Four Degrees

Four Degrees. Essay by Roula Seikaly

In an unrelenting 24/7 news cycle, the footage of environmental chaos – from floods and fires to warming oceans, fuels the anxiety we feel over climate change. Humble Arts Foundation’s contribution to Four Degrees highlights contemporary art photographers responding to our fears for the planet’s future. The 30+ photographers we selected, while occasionally teetering on abstraction, use a straight, representational, or documentary-leaning approach to visualize these feelings and metaphors for catharsis.

Images by Yadira Hernández-Picó and Lori Waselchuk, for example, convey intimate accounts of extreme weather, emphasizing a personal toll not often conveyed photo journalistically. Hernández-Picó reports the aftermath of Hurricane Maria in 2017. Nearly five years on, full financial and material recovery remains out of reach for many in the unincorporated US territory. An elderly Puerto Rican woman stands in the kitchen of her once-covered home. Small details - clean dishes on the drying rack, stacked cooking ware at her feet - emphasize how violent weather conditions interrupt life’s daily routine. Her expression could be determination, or resignation, or the look of someone who doesn’t have the luxury of waiting in safety while wealthy nations decide if it’s in our best interest to address the environmental damage we’ve already caused.

Lori Waselchuck takes another approach to the rippling emotional impact of natural disasters in her work responding to Hurricane Katrina, which drowned New Orleans nearly 20 years ago. The local and national disaster response laid bare how unprepared we were, and still are, to address the combined consequences of environmental exploitation and systemic racism. Waselchuck’s photograph of bus riders could represent the traumatized people who, for sheer luck, escaped the Big Easy in late August 2005, and those who didn’t. We all but feel his panicked grip on the seat cushion, and the worry rising like flood waters in his fellow riders.

Another artist, Forrest Woodward, foregrounds those who will be most affected by climate catastrophe. Working in Tuvalu, a South Pacific island nation threatened by rising waters, Woodward photographed a child at play in the surf. Aesthetically, it looks like millions of others captured during a family beach vacation. More gravely, it also represents the millions of children worldwide - Black, Brown, and Indigenous - who will experience greater suffering as environmental degradation and our willful inaction undermines a quality of life that western nations zealously defend as ours by right. 

In late June 2021, as we prepared to publish this exhibition, populations living in historically temperate climes - Moscow, the Pacific Northwest and British Columbia - faced record-breaking 100 plus degree days. The western United States continues to languish in drought conditions, and fears for what this and future fire seasons may deliver intensify. These recent events are but a few around the globe that signal that what was once “extreme” may now just be “weather, and that what was once “over there” is now here.

Four Degrees visualizes both the anxieties that have bubbled up, and the need to stay engaged and hopeful as we work for change.