Visual Environmental Communication

Anders Hansen, David Machin

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781317621362
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Communication Studies
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

In 2008, the editors published a well-cited journal paper arguing that while scholarly work on media representations of environmental issues had made substantial progress in textual analysis there had been much less work on visual representations. This is surprising given the increasingly visual nature of media and communication, and in light of emerging evidence that the environment is visualized through the use of increasingly symbolic and iconic images.

Addressing these matters, this volume marks out the present state of the field and contains chapters that represent fresh and exciting high quality scholarly work now emerging on visual environmental communication. These include a range of fascinating and often alarming topics which draw on a variety of methods and forms of visual communication. The book demonstrates that research needs to think much more widely about what we mean by the 'visual' which plays a massive yet under-researched role in the politics and ideology of public understanding and misunderstanding of and the environment and environmental problems.

The book is of relevance to students and researchers in media and communication studies, cultural studies, film and visual studies, geography, sociology, politics and other disciplines with an interest in the politics of visual environmental communication.

This book was published as a special issue of Environmental Communication: A Journal of Nature and Culture.

INTRODUCTION

Researching Visual Environmental Communication

Anders Hansen & David Machin

In 2008, we published a journal paper arguing that while scholarly work on media representations of environmental issues had made substantial progress in textual analysis, there had been much less work on visual representations. This special edition has a number of aims in this respect. It seeks to mark out where there has been progress since 2008, and the papers in this collection represent some of the fresh and exciting high quality scholarly work now emerging on an expanding number of topics and using different methods. We argue that we need to think more openly about what we mean by “the visual.” We begin by placing research into visual representations of the environment into the wider trajectory of visual studies research. We then proceed to review key trends in visual environmental communication research and to delineate core dimensions, contexts and sites of visual analysis.

In 2008, we published a journal paper arguing that, while scholarly work on media representations of environmental issues had made substantial progress in textual analysis (e.g., Boykoff, 2007, 2008; Carvalho & Burgess, 2005; Shanahan & McComas, 1999), much less work had been done on visual representations. This special edition has a number of aims in this respect. It seeks to mark out where there has been progress since that time. The papers in this collection represent some of the fresh and exciting high quality scholarly work now emerging on an expanding number of topics and using different methods. We want to take this opportunity to establish where we are now, what questions we should now be asking, and in what directions we might fruitfully move. We show for one thing that we need to think more openly as regards what we mean by “the visual.” We begin to do this by placing the research of visual representations of the environment into the wider trajectory of visual studies research. This provides some clearer indications of what is at stake specifically as regards “the visual.” We then proceed to review key trends in visual environmental communication research and to outline some of the key areas and challenges for moving forward.

Researching Visual Communication

A number of scholars have observed a broader growth in interest in visual communication across academic disciplines (Pauwels, 2012; Rose, 2012). On the one hand, this increase represents a growing acknowledgment of the important role played by visual communication. On the other, it also represents a sense that scholars are coming together to share knowledge of visual communication and also looking outward to other disciplines for new methods and theories. Pauwels (2012) points out that there has been a tendency in visual research for different fields to reinvent the wheel as they operate in their own isolated networks. Pauwels presents his own edited collection motivated to provide a more integrated set of visual methods. And certainly we would see part of the role of this special issue to showcase the different kinds of methods and approaches that scholars from different fields bring to what we term as a set of core concerns.

This increase in interest in visual communication can be traced to a number of influences, and considering these and their later trajectory is important in allowing us to identify what kind of path we may need to follow in the study of visual representations of the environment. The idea of the study of visual communication in the areas of media and culture can be placed from the 1970s with the interest in the ideas of Marxist thinkers, such as Adorno and Horkheimer, and then the 1980s with the influence particularly of the Birmingham School of Cultural Studies. The work of people like Stuart Hall (1977) had a considerable influence, particularly in the UK, pointing to the importance of the visual in culture, how we needed to think of culture not simply as things like art and theater, but in an anthropological sense, as a set of practices and beliefs that formed a set of values, attitudes and ideas about how the world worked, and what was important. What is culture could be thought of as what is accepted as common sense knowledge of how things are, of who we are, and of how the world works.

Such a notion of culture led to a switch in the idea of culture as a reflection of society to one where it could cause and shape society. And much research in media and cultural studies belong to this kind of tradition, drawing out the ideologies realized in images. And to some extent the activity of researching visual representations of the environment is of this nature, as we seek to unpack the kinds of cultural baggage and ideologies that shape our thoughts about the planet, about nature and the nature of the threats it faces.

Further, this view of culture means that we look to the nature of the industries where representations are reproduced. Here we seek to understand the production and the economics that are behind production, such as the way in which individual media outlets are owned by globally operating conglomerates often interlinked with wider corporate and financial institutions (McChesney, 2004), how advertisements are the engines of mass media (Jhally, 1991), and how certain kinds of media products are financed and distributed (McDonald & Wasko, 2007).

This tradition of research into visual culture also placed “seeing” as one important critical point of analysis. Seeing is a result of the cultures in which we have grown up and live. Representations in news, photography, television and films are part of the manner in which culture shapes our ways of seeing. There have been a number of works on this from Berger’s seminal Ways of seeing (1972). What is of interest here is why particular viewers look in different ways and how images invite different kinds of views. As an example from art history, Berger shows that women in oil paintings were depicted as passive, naked, vain and sexually alluring, pointing to the fact that they were designed to be looked at by men (1972, p. 54). Mulvey’s (1975) well-cited study on the “male gaze” in cinema argues that movies present a masculine view of female passivity and sexuality. Seeing has also been thought of in terms of the ways in which different kinds of viewers in terms of gender, social class, age, will interpret what they view (Hall, 1973/1980). These ideas call us to think about how visual representations of the environment point to cultures of viewing; for example, the viewing of landscapes through a romantic gaze, seeing them as representing some pristine and innocent view of nature, or seeing the planet in terms of resources that can be exploited.

This sense of different kinds of seeing reminds us that we need to understand how different kinds of people see images of the environment, whether produced by marketing companies to show they are carbon friendly, and the clichés produced by news programs, or those produced by environmental campaigners. We need to ask how these appeal to different kinds of viewing sensibilities.

All of this emphasis on the visual was especially important, as scholars like Jenks (1995) point out, as Western culture has come to equate seeing with knowing, even if this seeing is essentially culturally loaded. Central to this line of research was the perceived documentary role of the photograph. Early uses of the photograph were celebrated for their power to document and bear witness, but scholars working in Visual Studies began to question this power. Authors like Sontag (2004) pointed to the way in which iconic images represent and replace complex processes. Others made the observation that many images presented to the public claiming to document and bear witness, rather lean on well-trodden themes that are consonant and chime with existing sets of values (Cottle, 2009).

In the late 1980s, Baudrillard (1988) warned that due to such images we had ceased to be able to make a distinction between the real and the represented; such was the nature of living in a world with such a flow of images. This echoed the earlier concerns of Barthes (1973), who argued that the image can allow a predominance of certain kinds of mass disseminated myths that tend to support the interests of the powerful in society. And many scholars, influenced also by the ideas of Foucault (1972), began to think about the way that the interests of the powerful can be naturalized through the dissemination of particular kinds of images that foster specific kinds of ideas, values and identities that favor the world of corporate capitalism. In our own work (Hansen & Machin, 2008), we have looked at the way that commercial image archives supply images to media across the planet that are designed precisely to point to the kinds of clichés and myths writers like Baudrillard and Foucault had in mind.

Finally, much scholarly work has gone into how the visual communicates. Different kinds of interests and concerns are found across different fields. In art, an analysis might approach a painting in terms of use of perspective, of conventions of representing landscapes, scenes and figures and lighting (Panofsky, 1972). In photography, we can look at focus, angle and point of view, in other words composition and the perspective set up for the viewer (Barthes, 1977). For movies, we can add dimensions like editing, cuts, continuity and slow motion (Monaco, 2009) or look at them in terms of the way that they construct the world through the film narrative form (Bordwell & Thompson, 2008; Metz, 1974). Analyzing all of these can help to reveal how representations are being shaped and manipulated for the viewer.

Of course, the realm of how images work has been one core focus of semiotics, although in Anglo American scholarship it is primarily the work of Barthes (1973, 1977) that has been more widely used to look at the way elements and styles in images can be used to connote wider meanings and values that may not be otherwise overtly stated. More recently the work of linguists, such as Kress and van Leeuwen (1996/2006) in their classic work Reading Images, has sought to provide more systematic tools for relating matters in visual composition to underlying ideologies.

While these approaches to visual culture appear on the face of it pretty comprehensive, authors such as Elkins (2003) have been critical of the rather narrow definitions of the visual used in the field with tendency to focus on television, film and photographs. But visual culture infuses our lives in so many more ways, each in its own way communicating ideas, values and identities and providing different kinds of seeing. Visual communication can be done through the clothes we wear, through gesture, through the way we layout our homes, through the way houses are built to suggest austerity and conformity or their opposites. For the likes of Elkins, it is this wider sense of visual communication that we must embrace.

So, to what extent can research into visual representations of the environment expand its sense of the visual? There is room here to think in terms of the political economy of these representations, the ideologies they carry and the kinds of culturally loaded viewing that they carry, along with the way that different kinds of viewers experience them.

Studies of Visual Representations of the Environment

In (2010), Hansen pointed to the rise since the early 1960s of a familiar, yet superficial, public vocabulary and discourse on a wide range of “problems” and “issues” seen as associated with our natural environment. Key terms and labels characterizing this vocabulary have become familiar through sheer repetition in public media and communication. But while much research has focused on the textual, rhetorical and linguistic construction of the public vocabulary on the environment, much less attention has been given to its visual articulation and construction. Yet, the public vocabulary on the environment is to a large extent a visual vocabulary, and the very same kinds of issues that have emerged in visual studies more broadly are of equal relevance here. These include the problematic tendency of conflating “seeing” with “knowing or understanding” and the culturally conditioned notion that images “document reality” in a less mediated, constructed or manipulated way than other types of communication.

The invisibility and slow development of many environmental problems pose particular difficulties for their news construction and communication generally, and for their visual representation specifically. As many scholars have pointed out (e.g., Adam, 1998; Cox, 2013; Doyle, 2007; Hannigan, 2006), the difficulty of providing simple visual representations of causes and consequences poses a challenge to their visualization and more widely to the acceptance of their very existence. In an early study of environmental news, Schoenfeld, Meier, and Griffin (1979) noted that one of the key challenges for news coverage of environmental issues was the mismatch between the demands of a rapid news-cycle and the often long-term and slow-evolving pace of many environmental problems. But the problem extends significantly further than a mismatch of cycles: many environmental problems are just not that visible and the substances that cause them may themselves be invisible or innocuous-looking (Peeples, 2011). These are characteristics that make environmental problems and their visual representation more open – than, for example, their representation in text/language – to interpretation and indeed to ideological manipulation.

It has long been recognized that perceptions/images of nature are socially, politically and culturally constructed (Macnaghten & Urry, 1998; Soper, 1995; Urry, 1992; Williams, 1973, 1976/1983). Historically specific constructions and visual representations of nature are used – and exploited ideologically – to inform everything from public debate about genetics (Hansen, 2006), advertising and marketing of products, places and ideas (Ahern, Bortree, & Smith, 2012; Hansen, 2002; Svoboda, 2011; Williamson, 1978), to the marketing of tourist destinations (Todd, 2010; Urry, 1992), and to television documentaries or films (Bousé, 2000; Ferreira, 2004; Mitman, 1999; Rust, Monani, & Cubitt, 2013; Wall, 1999). For most of these studies, however, visual analysis has not been the central focus. It is only in recent years that studies focusing on the visual ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Citation Information
• 1. Introduction: Researching Visual Environmental Communication
• 2. Visualizing the Chesapeake Bay Watershed Debate
• 3. Imaging Toxins
• 4. Selling Nature in a Resource-Based Economy: Romantic/Extractive Gazes and Alberta’s Bituminous Sands
• 5. “Single-minded, compelling, and unique”: Visual Communications, Landscape, and the Calculated Aesthetic of Place Branding
• 6. The Nature of Time: How the Covers of the World’s Most Widely Read Weekly News Magazine Visualize Environmental Affairs
• 7. Sporting Nature(s): Wildness, the Primitive, and Naturalizing Imagery in MMA and Sports Advertisements
• 8. Mobilizing Artists: Green Patriot Posters, Visual Metaphors, and Climate Change Activism
• Index