[Winter 2024]

Bénédicte Ramade

Photographie contemporaine & anthropocène
Danièle Méaux
Paris, Éditions Filigranes, 2022, 288 pages

[Excerpt]

How do we photograph the hyper-object that is the Anthropocene? How do we capture the geological and atmospheric dimensions of this human-determined epoch, the chronology of which stretches back centuries, according to research on the Capitalocene (Andreas Malm), the Plantationocene (Anna Tsing and Donna Haraway), and, more recently, the Pathocene (Gil Bartholeyns)? Certainly, in her latest book Danièle Méaux does not claim to o er an easy solution to the challenge presented by the visuality of a geological era that has become a cultural, philosophical, and artistic issue. Rather than venturing a definition of Anthropocene photography, she prefers to travel down various paths following her instinct, asserting that she is establishing neither panorama nor history. Similarly, she doesn’t list the various intellectual and political authorities on the concept of Anthropocene who have devised the various labels supposedly correcting the globalizing and unjust standardizing equivalency of the prefix “anthropo” (which implies that all of humanity is to blame for the process of Earth’s transformation). She prefers to concentrate on her core expertise, photography, by including bodies of work chosen for their paradigmatic value (for a Western-centric world, no doubt), which she analyzes in great detail…

[ Complete issue, in print and digital version, available here: Ciel variable 125 – AGGLOMERATIONS ]
[ Complete article, in digital version, available here: Photographie contemporaine et anthropocène – Bénédicte Ramade ]