The Day After Tomorrow: Our Aerial Future
By Maria Popova
We love aerial photography — there’s something about a bird’s-eye view that puts this Earth, and our place in it, in perspective. Nowhere is this more poignant and gripping than when it opens our eyes to the concrete scale and magnitude of something we hold as abstract guilt in our collective conscience: The environmental impact of human activity and consumer culture. That’s precisely what photographer J. Henry Fair explores in his compelling new book, The Day After Tomorrow: Images of Our Earth in Crisis — a rousing invitation to bear witness to the environmental devastation we continue to inflict on our own home, and a visceral call to arms to take responsibility and change our ways.
Fair does a remarkable job of reconciling the book’s powerful artistic vision with the near-investigative feel of the work as it turns a lens on the industries most vital to post-industrial society — oil, fertilizer, coal, factory farming — and unearths their dirty not-so-little secrets.
It is first and foremost an art book, the pictures compelling in the manner of painters like O’Keefe, Giacometti, and Caspar David Friedrich. But it’s also a book about the power that the consumer has to shape the world through the purchase decisions she makes.” ~ J. Henry Fair
Images via Flavorpill
As an artist with a message, one asks oneself: how do I translate my message to my medium such that it will effect the change I want? At first, I photographed ‘ugly’ things; which is, in essence, throwing the issue in people’s faces. Over time, I began to photograph all these things with an eye to making them both beautiful and frightening simultaneously, a seemingly irreconcilable mission, but actually quite achievable given the subject matter.” ~ J. Henry Fair
Provocative and breathtaking, The Day After Tomorrow is out today and won’t disappoint.
—
Published February 15, 2011
—
https://www.themarginalian.org/2011/02/15/the-day-after-tomorrow/
—
ABOUT
CONTACT
SUPPORT
SUBSCRIBE
Newsletter
RSS
CONNECT
Facebook
Twitter
Instagram
Tumblr