João Laet is a Brazilian photographer. He shot the image above for a news agency in late August, as an unusually high number of fires consumed the Amazon rainforest. What did he intend by making the destruction appear so sublime?
‘Nature has ceased to be what it always had been – what people needed protection from,’ Susan Sontag observed in On Photography (1977). ‘Now nature – tamed, endangered, mortal – needs to be protected from people.’ In the age of anthropogenic climate change, natural disasters are increasingly man-made, and photographs of their effects can serve as premonitions of human mortality. They are also often beautiful in a way that belies their subject matter, or perhaps prompts a reconsideration of beauty and sublimity.
Laet does not see a conflict between the need to document atrocities and the desire to create a visually pleasing image. He told me he was attracted to photography as a type of popular resistance, and refers to the blaze as ‘a criminal fire […] the work of agrobusiness and the extreme right against the forest, the indigenous and minorities.’
How Is Disaster Photography Sublime?
How Is Disaster Photography Sublime?
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