Landscape photography in the web of life: Olaf Otto Becker’s documentary sublime

Peck, Julia ORCID: 0000-0001-5134-2471 (2018) Landscape photography in the web of life: Olaf Otto Becker’s documentary sublime. In: Northern Light: Landscape, Photography and Evocations of the North. Image . Transcript Verlag, Bielefeld. ISBN 978-3-8376-3975-9

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Abstract

Olaf Otto Becker, a photographer renown for his photographs of the Arctic north, has recently turned his attention to the forests of Indonesia, Bolivia, Brazil and Australia. As William Ewing has noted (2015), perhaps this change in direction is logical given that the melting of the Arctic is partly connected to the destruction of the world’s major forests and that Becker’s own work has become increasingly preoccupied with charting human-led changes to the environment. Taking an overview of Becker’s output from Broken Line (2007) to Reading the Landscape (2014), I argue that Becker’s approach can be read as an attempt to depict the relationship between human and nature, the everyday and the sublime in a time of neoliberalised capital. Using Jason Moore’s theories of cheap capital, I argue that Becker’s photographs visualise human/nature relationships that transcend traditional binary concepts that promote the idea of humans being separate from nature. Indeed, Becker visualises landscapes that are co-produced with nature and humans.

Item Type:	Book Section
Uncontrolled Keywords:	Olaf Otto Becker, landscape photography, ecology of social and environmental relations, Jason Moore, web of life, neoliberalism, capitalism, sublime
Subjects:	N Fine Arts > N Visual arts (General) For photography, see TR T Technology > TR Photography
Divisions:
Research Priority Areas:	Culture, Continuity, and Transformation
Depositing User:	Julia Peck
Date Deposited:	29 Aug 2018 16:03
Last Modified:	04 Feb 2022 13:01
URI:	https://eprints.glos.ac.uk/id/eprint/5913

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