Remember when the world was bigger than we were?
Remember when the seas could still be thought of as boundless, when the world was enormous and human beings still very small?
Those were the days. Today, the climate is changing. The seas are running out of fish. It’s almost impossible to find a place on the planet where you don’t hear a jet plane, where you can still see the stars. From the melting ice caps to the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, humanity’s effect on the planet has been overwhelming – so much so that scientists, politicians, economists and others talk about our era as the Anthropocene (AN-thruh-puh-seen) – the epoch of geological time defined by human impact on the Earth.
That term entered the lexicon about 20 years ago, and the Nasher Museum of Art is now addressing the Anthropocene by mounting and hosting an exhibition called “Second Nature: Photography in the Age of the Anthropocene.” Although scientists are still discussing the exact definition of when the Anthropocene started and how to define and measure it, Nasher chief curator Marshall Price has been working on this exhibition for years. “We are in a new era,” he says, “and the new era needs a new language in order to document it.”
That language is, appropriately, photography, says exhibition co-curator Jessica May, executive director of the Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art in Kansas City: “That transformation is partly based on the idea that what we’re looking at, in a global sense, and what photographers are looking at, lacks the kind of innocence and belief that the world is bigger than us.” That changes the way artists look at the world, and photography is uniquely suited to tell that story, especially as photography itself has changed in recent years.
“The notion of photographs being able to tell a story so well,” Price says, is no longer “limited necessarily to photojournalism.” As photography has traveled further afield from pure documentation, it has also become much more malleable, May says. “This show has sculptural photography, it has photography printed on wood, photography printed on metal.”
May also notes that the overwhelming threats of the Anthropocene unite humanity in a way not unlike its fear of atomic weapons in the 1950s. This show addresses that “existential relationship to humanity,” and she compares it with the famous 1955 “Family of Man” photography exhibit curated by Edward Steichen.
It’s a worthy comparison. Whereas the “Family of Man” photos focused overwhelmingly on human faces, “Anthropocene” images tend toward vast human-altered landscapes – sprawl, enormous agricultural or civic projects, flood and storm damage – in which human forms are tiny if present at all, expressing the point of overwhelming global change.
Not that photographers were asked to make Anthropocene images. “There is no one singular narrative,” Price says.
Says May, “This is not a couple dozen artists who are all focused on the concept of the Anthropocene. This is artists who are focused on what it means to live in this complicated world.”
Which is kind of the point. Sometimes artists asked to participate in a group will decline, saying their work doesn’t fit the theme. In this case, Price says, “They said things like, ‘I’ve never thought of my work within the context of the Anthropocene. But I totally see it now that you’re talking to me.’ The connective tissue is the fact that they are making images of this changing world in new ways.”
The show is organized by the Nasher and the deCordova Sculpture Park and Museum in Lincoln, Massachusetts. It runs through Jan. 5, 2025. n