Changing circumstances

Changing Circumstances is an expansive presentation of international contemporary photography, video, and new media art addressing the challenges presented by global change. It shows the works of thirty-four international artists, focusing on the ways in which these media reflect on our relationship, as individuals and as a society, to the natural environment around us. An important aspect of this presentation is how individual artists are using their work to address the impact of human behavior on the natural environment. The purpose of the book is to provoke, through visual art, new ways of thinking about how we see our role within the natural environment and our connection(s) to the rest of the planet-and how this affects our future. The book looks at ways in which artists and scientists are re-visioning our relationship with the Earth, its oceans and atmosphere. The artists and artworks confront a broad range of issues that are challenges to the future of the Earth. These include climate change, water, energy, biodiversity, and food production, population, natural resources, waste, and migration. Many of the works present atypical uses of visual art and photography to address these changes with new media, moving image, performance, and text. Essays by Thomas E. Lovejoy, professor of environmental science at George Mason University (Virginia), and Geof Rayner, honorary research fellow of City University London and a founder of Photofusion Photography Centre (London), look at the dynamic relationships between contemporary art photography, issues of global change, biodiversity and the relationship of human society to the environment. In her essay, FotoFest International co-founder and curator Wendy Watriss writes about the need for a new vision of Nature. FotoFest executive director Steven Evans provides the introduction for the book. In artist statements accompanying their images, the participating artists present their own perspectives on the state of Earth's ecosystems and the impacts of human society on the planet in the age of the Arthropocene, as widely recognized by scientists today.