4 - Environmental Harm and the Visual

Summary

Introduction

Among the most important moments in the history of photography was the publication, between 1844 and 1846, of William Henry Fox Talbot’s The Pencil of Nature. The collection, which was the first commercially published book to be illustrated with photographs, described Talbot’s development of the process of calotype printing, which allowed for the mechanical and chemical capture of light, producing what were, for much of the collection’s audience, the first photographic images they ever saw (Talbot 1989). The project included a collection of images that, somewhat remarkably, represents much of the spectrum of photographic subjects at play well over 150 years later: still lifes, portraits, architectural studies, and even slice- of- life or vérité images are all represented in Talbot’s work. What I want to draw attention to here, though, is not the content of Talbot’s work— as fascinating as it may be— but rather the title of that work. For Talbot, it seems, the relation between the photographic image and the ‘natural’ world (more on that shortly) was plainly evident, with photography at last delivering the ability to capture ‘nature’ as conceptualized as all that is not human. Capture, of course, also implies mastery or dominance, as made clear by Allan Sekula (1986: 4) when he noted that photography initially promised, in addition to its early juridical deployment discussed previously, ‘an enhanced mastery of nature’. Human visions of ‘nature’, then— and particularly nature’s forms and relations to the human and the social— have long been at the center of the power of images.

Just as our various interactions with and understandings of crime the criminal justice system writ large— to include, obviously, the sites with which this book is concerned— are constructed and conditioned by images and our encounters with images, so too are our interactions with and understandings of the natural environment. While green criminology has, since its inception in the 1990s, encouraged and engaged in the criminological exploration of harms and crimes affecting the natural environment, it has only more recently been significantly attentive to the visual. This chapter will make a case for the necessity of including the visual and visually attuned thinking within the green criminological paradigm, calling for a stream of green criminological thought that explicitly connects the environmental with the cultural and, most significantly, the visual.