What led you into this collective journey? What are your expectations?

Margaret LeJeune (ML): In Spring 2020, the Environmental Photography Collective (U.S.based artists Marion Belanger, Dana Fritz, Margaret LeJeune, Judy Natal, Martina Shenal, Terri Warpinski) was born out of a desire to create a more inclusive space in the historically androcentric fields of landscape and environmental photography. As artists with a long history as educators, our members have diverse yet overlapping interests that include environmental science, land use, biology, geology, cultural studies, and social justice. The breadth of our interests helps to build connections between our members, cultural producers, community leaders and scientific researchers, creating new production methods and ways to disseminate our work. Our expeditionary practices, in the US and abroad, reflect complex and important issues of climate change, habitat and species loss, social-political-geographic boundaries, and alarming shifts to the earth's major systems.

We work together as a Collective, and independently as artists, to cross boundaries and enliven conversations in a wide range of public and private spheres. We have created several public art projects that promote the understanding of science, democratization of knowledge, and promote curiosity about the ways in which the local can affect the global. Our diverse projects on sustainability, futurism, water pollution, ocean plastics, and more have engaged audiences that include K-12 children, University students, scientific communities, and artist colonies. Each endeavor helps to build and strengthen our network of local and global activists.

Dana, I’m familiar with the environmental focus of your work but I’m curious about how you relate to the work by other members of the collective. What connections do you see beyond the “environmental” focus?

Dana Fritz (DF): I’ve been thinking a lot about watersheds since I was awarded a photography commission from Platte Basin Timelapse. Regardless of arbitrary political boundaries, everyone and everything in a watershed is linked in a system. What happens downstream is a consequence of what happens upstream, both in time and space. This “river of consequences” has provided a fascinating lens with which to view the connections among work by members of our collective. Time spent in artist residencies at Cedar Point Biological Station and Homestead National Historical Park, as well as research for my work about the environmental history of the Nebraska National Forest, the largest hand-planted forest in the western hemisphere, has enabled me to see links in our work, especially where the subjects of our photographs are connected to federal policy.

© Dana Fritz from 'Field Guide to a Hybrid Landscape'

For example, U.S. Department of Agriculture policies planted a forest in a grassland, suppressed natural fires, and supported industrial, chemical dependent farming practices that led to erosion and loss of topsoil. The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers channelized the Mississippi River, destroying wetlands that protect the Gulf Coast from hurricanes and floods. Similarly, wetlands were drained in the Florida Everglades for agriculture and urbanization.

© Martina Shenal from the series '20/20'

While photographing volcanic landscapes in Oregon, Martina Shenal encountered unprecedented wildfire smoke that drifted across the United States resulting in dangerous air quality for millions of people downwind. Climate change has led to an increase in wildfire season length, wildfire frequency, and burned area, paradoxically fed by historic fire suppression policies.

© Margaret LeJeune, 'Watershed Triptych'

Margaret LeJeune’s Watershed Triptych inventively connects the USGS hydromaps of the largest agricultural watersheds in the U.S. to the dinoflagellates that cause the harmful algal blooms, often known as red tides, stimulated by terrestrial runoff.

© Judy Natal from 'Another Storm is Coming' 

In video works from Another Storm is Coming, Judy Natal beautifully and sorrowfully weaves together stories and songs of Gulf Coast residents recounting hurricane and flood experiences knowing they are not likely to be the last.

© Marion Belanger from 'Everglades'

Marion Belanger’s complex exploration of the Everglades juxtaposes healthy mangroves that provide habitat for fish and birds as well as protection from hurricanes with destroyed swampland that reminds us of the consequences of our actions. Terry Tempest Williams wrote, “The choices and decisions we make in terms of how we use the land ultimately affect our very DNA. Environmental issues are life issues.” In this way, we are all downstream.

Margaret, we know that despite many organizations calling attention to the ecological crises, the scenario is nevertheless dramatic. In what ways do you see the Collective responding to the world’s pressing environmental issues?

ML: One of the strongest aspects of our collective is the desire for engagement. Our curiosity and research interests have brought us together as a group and have also opened opportunities for us to work at field stations, research forests, national parks, and laboratories around the globe. For example, Dana Fritz’s residency at the Cedar Point Biological Station allowed her time to more deeply research the Sandhills through the library collection and herbarium. During a collaborative project at the Connecticut Agricultural Experimental Station Marion Belanger and Martha Lewis generated a permanent installation inspired by the archives and current research projects. This work invites visitors and researchers to reenvision their connections to the plants, animals, and other species being investigated at the research station.

Marion Belanger and Martha Lewis from 'Plants and Insects: Excavating The Archive'

Similarly, Terri Warpinski’s Emptied Nests, created in collaboration with the University of Wisconsin’s Natural History Museum, reframes the idea of the cabinet of curiosity through an installation and accompanying diagram, allowing space for the overlapping conversations between the scientific, social, and personal.

Terri Warpinski from 'Empty Nests'

Judy Natal’s video work Breathed on the Waters from the commissioned work Another Storm Is Coming is an engaging work that highlights meaningful and compassionate collaboration. Bringing together diverse faith practitioners to share songs and chants, Natal records their pleas for safety from future storms, calling attention to spirituality, religion, and prayer as ways of knowing and understanding the climate crisis.

© Judy Natal from 'Breathed On The Waters'

These works characterize what Lucy Lippard called The Lure of the Local. By engaging with the local, we are creating works that ask the viewer to consider the cultural, political, scientific, and historical issues that affect these regions. We are recontextualizing important land and environmental issues and, through this process, presenting new ways of disseminating knowledge and growing community.

Margaret, could you introduce us to the main ideas in your series 'Growing Light'?

ML: In the series Growing Light, I make cross-species collaborations with bioluminescent organisms. This work reflects my curiosity and wonder of the natural world. By harnessing the fleeting light of dinoflagellates, bacteria, and other glowing species, I ask the viewer to consider our connections to these tiny creatures and the importance of working toward a non-human centered world. I see wonder as a survival skill for the Anthropocene, an imperative to help us find hope and innovation amidst the climate crisis.

© Margaret LeJeune from 'Growing Light'

Terri, environmental problems transcend administrative and conceptual boundaries. They affect us all together. How can we better disseminate the outcomes of our searches/researches?

Terri Warpinski (TW): Among the many dimensions our Collective’s individual research and creative practices share is a reliance on field work - where the theoretical or hypothetical meet the imaginary powers of the artist; provoked through the ground-truthing of direct observation.

© Terri Warpinki from 'Surface Tension'

Over the span of two decades I returned, numerous times, and for extended periods, to contested borderlands to witness the ongoing dialectic between place and change. Each time growing my bonds to, and knowledge of, the people and the place. The Collective shares this pattern of connection and deepening intimacy with our subjects. Place is often only the starting point; the beginning of the journey. Fully immersed in our subject, our once strongly held notions, our preconceptions, are often disassembled and reconstituted, leading to creative insights otherwise impossible to imagine.

Margaret LeJeune from 'Evidence of the Dart'

For example, in Evidence of the Dart, Margaret LeJeune’s gathering of both plant matter and refuse from along the Dart River invites our reconsideration of the role of collecting specimens in the creation of knowledge and the indexicality of the photographic object.

© Marion Belanger from 'River'

Others in the Collective have found rich conceptual material and engaged in extensive fieldwork in locations that are deeply personal. Such is the case in Marion Belanger’s River. Here Marion reminisces on her childhood experiences of the Naugatuck River, recounts its near death, and gently emanates hopefulness for the rebirth of this Connecticut waterway. This project, like so many in the Collective, moves far beyond a vignette to a multi-layered view, extending the sense of presence outside the individual frame of reference to embrace universal concerns.

Marion Belanger from the installation 'Landfill' 

In this time of upheaval, we are all reminded that the ground on which we stand is an accumulation of nature, histories, social constructs and their underlying ideologies. As a collective we share a vision and a purpose as cultural producers to invest our attention, and direct our creative energies, towards what we understand to be the environmental imperative of our time. Through the research we engage in, the stories we tell, and the myriad ways in which we bring our work out into the local, regional and global communities we are a part of, we are issuing a call to action – whether that action is a questioning of past assumptions, or a commitment to advocate for sweeping change at the highest level.

Marion, your current work is an investigation into ecological research and the complex relationship that human beings have with our planet. Do you think that photography could/should dialogue with other disciplines in order to produce organic, transversal, and accessible knowledge? How do you deal with this issue in your work?

Marion Belanger (MB): Absolutely! Intersections across disciplines can produce both poetry and knowledge, and it invites innovation and new ideas. Our planet is in a dangerous “red zone” and creative thinking and collaborative problem solving are crucial. During the pandemic, I paired my photographs with those I had found in agricultural science archives. The oddness of the image pairs in Wired Forest speaks to this incredible moment that we find ourselves in. Art can, and should speak to the urgent questions of our time in ways that are fresh and surprising.

© Marion Belanger from 'Wired Forest'

Dana Fritz’s handmade artist book, titled (pocket) Field Guide to a Hybrid Landscape uses a topographical map of the Nebraska National Forest which literally holds the pages within the forest map. Archival photographs, printed on semi-translucent pages are overlaid upon one side of the double page spreads. She layers images, time, and history together to create an evocative narrative about the altered landscape. The linear pattern of shade and light surrounds a man and a shovel, perhaps signifying the boundary between the undoing of the natural ecosystem that was once there, and the future human reshaping of the landscape to come. Dana refers to the Nebraska National Forest as a hybrid landscape. I wonder, are there any authentic wild landscapes left, anywhere?

© Dana Fritz from 'Field Guide to a Hybrid Landscape'

Judy Natal, in her series Future Perfect, sequences photographs from the geothermic Icelandic landscape, the Biosphere 2 in Arizona, and a Las Vegas desert reserve into four chapters that time travel backward from a rather bleak, monochromatic future (2040) to a present that is decidedly more optimistic and chromatic (2020). In so doing she examines the potentiality of human choice, and the possibility for utopian harmony - or of desperation as the earth moves towards destruction. The narrative thread utilizes steam portraits, landscapes, public art that suggests future fears, nature drawings by children, and the automobile as a dated icon to explore hope, innocence, and potential climate catastrophe.  

© Judy Natal from 'Future Perfect'

In her practice, Margaret LeJeune draws heavily from science, and as a sailor, she has experienced the capricious nature of the sea. Just Below The Surface is a series of large photographic collages inspired by her early efforts as a novice sailor. Using abstraction and geometric forms she investigates both the power of nature and the human desire to control it while also highlighting the expressive beauty and power of the seascape, and of creativity itself.  

© Margaret LeJeune from 'Just Below The Surface'

Martina, what led you into this collective journey?

Martina Shenal (MS): After an impromptu portfolio share at a photography conference in Houston, I was reminded of the common ground that we share as artists and educators through our annual conference interactions. On the heels of the pandemic lockdown, the Collective seemed a fortuitous opportunity to engage with, and learn from, artists whose environmental research is deeply embodied in their creative practice.

Martina, your series Secondary Nature examines human interaction with the landscape- the ways that we alter, mediate, engage with and represent it. What have you learned from this project?

MS: During a sabbatical research year based in Fujisawa, I focused on the precarious balance of urban and coastal infrastructure, including sea walls and protective water channeling systems, structures built to withstand repeated earthquakes, typhoons, tsunamis and mudslides. Over the course of the 7-year project, my observations on the ways we alter, mediate, and interact with the natural world have shifted to reveal a more direct set of encounters as a witness to the accelerated pace, power, and deadly impacts of a warming climate.

© Martina Shenal, Aftermath (typhoon)

Aftermath (typhoon) features a view through a blown out panel on the exterior of my building after the storm, and Enoshima (ladders), a residential backyard with massive concrete walls that channel torrential rains from typhoons to prevent deadly mudslides in a region besieged by both.

© Martina Shenal, 'Enoshima (ladders)'

Common themes permeate the Collective’s creative output, including Judy Natal’s most recent series, The Weather Diaries. Weaving together a poetic narrative that traverses multiple islands, her work highlights the rich social, cultural, and spiritual traditions of indigenous land stewardship that have sustained their cultures for millennia. 

© Judy Natal from 'The Weather Diaries'

The landscape in Japan is carefully and obviously shaped at all scales, an interest that Dana Fritz and I share. Dana moves from an early focus within Japanese gardens, literally ‘bending nature’ to our will in her series Garden Views, to an inventive re-configuring of nature utilizing the miniaturized scale of bonsai in Views Removed.

© Dana Fritz, (left) 'Garden Views', (right) 'Views Removed'

Marion Belanger’s Rift/Fault series features twin narratives that draw our attention to tectonic processes- exploring both the seen and unseen. Observing the San Andreas Fault and the rift zone in Iceland, Marion’s work questions the uneasy relationship between geologic force and the limits of human intervention.

© Marion Belanger from 'Rift/Fault'

My recent series, 20/20 narrows its scope geographically to volcanic remnants in the western US, a region heavily impacted by megadrought and unprecedented wildfires. We have a clear view of what climate change looks like–and a shared responsibility to amplify the call for global action.

Judy, as an interdisciplinary photographic artist, curator, and writer, how do you think your work addresses the complexities of the climate crisis? Do you think artists have a responsibility to encourage and provoke difficult conversations as we move toward a dystopian future? 

Judy Natal (JN): For the past four years, I have been working on a hybrid project called the Weather Diaries that weaves together three volcanic island sites including Iceland, the Faroe Islands, and Hawai'i. These locations serve as microcosms of our complex environmental crisis. Consisting of oral history interviews, video, musical interludes, archival research, photography, and craft, it is the most challenging and ambitious project I’ve taken on to date. It is also the most personal and emotional. The visual and written narratives in this work demand vulnerability, transparency, and honesty that I have not previously explored. Through these new ways of working I am inviting conversations that get to the heart of the climate crisis.

© Judy Natal from 'The Weather Diaries'

Judy, this past year we have been isolated, confined, and we were somehow forced to change perspective on human relationships. Do we need more collective action in this regard, sharing knowledge but also empathy?

JN: The emotional aspects of climate change are not often talked about. The knowing that something isn’t quite right often gets relegated to a quiet anxiety that rests below the surface of our daily lives as we feel the strange unraveling of what the seasons usually bring. We are experiencing weather patterns we have never known. We are realizing we need each other; the collective is always stronger than one.

The Environmental Photography Collective asks that we step away from long established habits that depended upon formal strategies to create distance between the photographer, the subject and the viewer, instilling a curtain of photographic neutrality. For example, it took me a year to reinvent new pictorial strategies that would instead foster a sense of intimacy, blurring boundaries between portrait, landscape and still life, and welcome everyone as participants rather than observers. This dictated that I shed my artistic ego, relinquish a certain amount of control, and “identifiable style”, so important to art as commodity, and step out of my own way and let the photographs speak for themselves rather than amplify my own voice.

© Margaret LeJeune, 'Milkweed'

© Marion Belanger, 'Feeling Moss'

Didacticism has become a dirty word. After years of fearing this label, I now embrace ecological didacticism. I believe that artists have a responsibility to provoke dialogue regarding the climate crisis. We can no longer be neutral. Emotions, unfettered and raw, make people uncomfortable. But isn’t that what we should be feeling now?

Any final thoughts?

The Collective: The ecosystem of the Environmental Photographers Collective is both a model and a metaphor that highlights our interconnections. To nurture one another is to thrive. By elevating our responsibilities and stewardship to each other, we forge our mutually shared concerns for the earth and the ways in which we communicate these ideas through visual culture.  

Environmental Photography Collective (website)