In September 2025, Donald Trump marked his return to the United Nations with a shock statement: “global warming is the greatest scam ever perpetrated against the world.” The claim came just two months after a warning issued by the Global Footprint Network: in 2025, humanity began living on ecological credit as of July 24—meaning it is now consuming the equivalent resources of 1.8 planets. On a global scale, the numbers continue to rise. The sense of urgency grows, yet remains abstract.
Technological advances—among them the exponential growth of artificial intelligence—dilute the alarm bells. Last May, MIT Technology Review warned: “Projections published by Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory announce that by 2028, more than half of our electricity will be reserved for data centers and used by AI.” Yet nothing changes. Nature, reduced to a concept, no longer seems to matter. How, then, can it be placed back at the center of political concerns? What can art do in the face of the climate crisis? In the open air of the Anthropocene, how do photographers manage to make this rupture visible—and suggest ways of repairing it?
Awakening memory
“I wouldn’t say that nature is a center of interest, because a center of interest implies a notion of choice. I would rather see the attention we pay to it as a necessity,” says Małgorzata Stankiewicz. A necessity that, according to the Polish photographer, runs counter to the rationalism, objectification, and exploitation promoted by Western culture—factors that alter our very perception of the natural state of things. A misalignment also identified by the Swedish-Finnish duo Inka&Niclas: “We often find ourselves in places people consider ‘pristine.’ You see buses unloading crowds who almost expect dinosaurs, unicorns, or volcanic eruptions to appear before their eyes,” they explain. These expectations are fueled by a digitalized nature, constructed through angles, timing, and algorithms, published to make us dream.
Over the decades, these representations become reference points and subtly raise our tolerance threshold for danger. “This is what we call the Shifting Baseline Syndrome: the idea that each generation accepts the diminished state of nature it inherits as the norm,” explains British photographer Polly Tootal, a member of the Inland collective. “When I began working around this concept, I knew it would allow me to explore the fear, grief, and concern I feel about our trajectory.” At the origin of each artistic approach, then, lies the same observation: the richness of nature, though admired, is no longer protected. Worse still, its weakening is minimized by a society that has forgotten its original magnitude. Through images, the bond must be restored, memory reawakened. “To me, the separation between nature and culture has never had any real substance; it seems as obsolete as other binaries inherited from our Western tradition, which I have always sought to undo,” affirms SMITH, whose work aims—through intimate exploration—to revive interconnection between beings, a “vibrant matrix” accessed through hybrid practices.
Translating interdependence
It is through experimentation that our relationship with the natural world can truly come alive. For Inka&Niclas, this is first and foremost a struggle: “with the false notion of ‘truth’ associated with the medium. Photography can sometimes be very sterile, rigid. It’s a real victory when you manage to break into it and fill it with energy.” Leaving room for chance, the duo focuses on exposure and transitions to reveal blurred zones, sculpting images and coating them with a viscous layer to evoke a “sublime toxicity,” allowing the mind to question what it sees.
Equally experimental, Polly Tootal’s work seeks to show degradation and vulnerability, pointing to spaces we believe intact yet that are in fact the result of decades of human alteration. “I intervene directly on my negatives with fungi, ink, spores, tree sap, charcoal, and mud. These processes alter the image by creating layers that place it in a dreamlike space,” she explains. Working on the phenomenon of aquatic hypoxia [the deoxygenation of oceans, editor’s note], Małgorzata Stankiewicz turns to an ancient technique: cyanotype. “I chose it for two reasons: because it is the least toxic analog photographic process, and because it seemed particularly suited to the subject depicted—the cyanobacteria formations observed in the Baltic Sea,” she says.
Finally, for SMITH, visual language asserts itself as a tool capable of translating the interdependence that structures their entire body of work: “the forest, plants, animals, fungi, insects, even celestial bodies, are not objects we contemplate, but extensions of our own body—our home, our vessel,” continues the artist, who uses a thermal camera to capture heat—“this invisible weave of the living, this common fabric that binds us”—within a poetic spectrum.
Continuing the search
To give weight to this bond, SMITH multiplies fields of reflection: “art, science, philosophy, spirituality, technology,” they list. After collaborating with astrophysicists, geologists, biologists, and engineers, they now turn toward “the practice of non-ordinary states of consciousness”—a conduit that allows easier access to the invisible.
A path between mystery and technology, empiricism and sensation, shared by Małgorzata Stankiewicz. In viridescent, afire, published by Blow Up Press, she transforms data and satellite images from NASA and the ESA, giving voice to various authors to compose a polyphony ranging from anthropology (Marija Gimbutas) to poetry (Edgar Allan Poe), forming a complex echo that resonates with the bluish abstraction of her cyanotypes. Polly Tootal explains these converging approaches as stemming from “a sense of urgency, a need to connect deeply rather than simply observe.” “Many artists are creating projects that don’t just document, but instead summon emotion, as a form of collective commemoration,” she adds.
Against the grain of post-apocalyptic representations of a dystopian world we have come to inhabit, these photographers seek to question the status quo, to understand what it means “to live in a world, and to reimagine our place within it,” says Polly Tootal, because for her, “fear paralyzes, but wonder mobilizes.” We must therefore continue searching. Reveal the “strange mechanisms that come into play in our perception of nature,” as Inka&Niclas underline. Experiment in order to better respond to a widespread sense of confusion. Draw inspiration from minority perspectives—those “individuals marginalized within the legitimate field of knowledge: psychonauts, Indigenous peoples, and more broadly, people from minority backgrounds.” Because these voices, as SMITH reminds us, are “absolutely essential to reinventing our relationship with the world.”
