Although the word has caught on like wildfire in a colloquial sense, it was ultimately rejected as a descriptive scientific term, not so much because it was inaccurate but because of disagreements over when exactly it would have started – 1945, marking the unlocking of nuclear power; 1610, which may be the first time human activity affected the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere; 1964, when the so-called Great Acceleration may have begun – or some other date altogether?.
In curating the show, Price strove to find images that could move audiences as much as the iconic Blue Marble image of the Earth, which transformed the minds of people around the globe in 1972 when it became one of the most widely viewed photos ever taken, and a clarion call for the environmental movement.
In the same vein, Lithium Mines #1 by the celebrated landscape photographer Edward Burtynsky offers a gorgeous view of the titular installation high in Chile’s Atacama Desert, a hotspot for extracting the lithium that makes possible so many contemporary technologies (including many “green” ones).
Dethloff and her colleagues struggled to represent the many tightly knotted, diverse phenomena that combine in exceedingly complex ways for the Anthropocene: “You can’t separate capitalism from resource extraction, can’t separate it from exploitative employment practices, a history of colonialism, the nature of consumerism, the production of waste … all these things that are inseparable that are creating the Anthropocene.”.
Hoping to help us better understand this substantial concept, the Cantor Arts Center’s new exhibition Second Nature: Photography in the Age of the Anthropocene brings together 44 photographic artists from across six continents, offering breathtaking and provocative looks at what humanity has wrought on this earth.
