Julia Peck

London College of Communication, School of Media, Faculty Member

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Julia Peck is Course Leader BA (Hons) Photography at London College of Communication. Julia is an experienced educator, writer and photographer with an interest in representations of landscape, ecologies and ontology.

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Judith L Green

University of California, Santa Barbara

Steven Pinker

Harvard University

Don Ross

University College Cork

Alejandra B Osorio

Wellesley College

Andrea Peto

Central European University

Michelle Henning

University of Liverpool

Serpil Oppermann

Kapadokya Üniversitesi

David Seamon

Kansas State University

Marek Tamm

Tallinn University

Christopher Witmore

Texas Tech University

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Papers by Julia Peck

Kruger, Johan Friedrich Carl (Fred)

Routledge eBooks, 2008

A short biographical and historical account of the photographic activities of Johan (John) Kruger... more

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

transcript Verlag eBooks, Dec 31, 2018

The Arctic has become a significant photographic subject over the past decade, acting as a beacon... more The Arctic has become a significant photographic subject over the past decade, acting as a beacon for those who wish to image the effects of climate change. Photographers, artists, writers, scientists, and tourists, visit and work in the landscape as a means of comprehending, and communicating messages about, the changes in the landscape. Both the act of visiting the Arctic, and producing individual and collaborative responses that meditate on climate change, have become a significant cultural activity. The material includes campaign-style communication produced by conservation and ecological organisations such as Greenpeace, media representations, scientific imagery, as well as artists' responses in a wide variety of media (Buckland 2006; Barth 2008; Matilsky 2013; Wells 2012). Indeed, one could say that there has been an outpouring of concern about the loss of sea and Arctic ice, and the impact this has on wildlife such as polar bears, marine life, and on the planetary weather system. There is also concern at the impact of changing biospheric phenomena on social living conditions both in the Arctic and in coastal regions around the world (Braschler and Fisher 2011). This chapter investigates the photography of Olaf Otto Becker. Becker is a German artist and photographer who has made a series of books and exhibited works that depict landscapes from Iceland and Greenland, including landscapes of inhabitation and scientific study; much of his work expressly addresses landscapes that are seriously affected by climate change. His later work shifts attention to forested regions in the global South, which have been severely compromised and reduced by fires and logging activities. Condensed into five publications, this wide-ranging subject matter is coherent in terms of Becker's visual approach, and represents an affective and effective criticism of neoliberal consumption and the operations of global capital.

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Petrochemical America by Richard Misrach and Kate Orff, New York, Aperture, 2012

Book review: Petrochemical America by Richard Misrach and Kate Orff New York, Aperture, 2012, 216... more

Preface and Acknowledgements

transcript Verlag eBooks, Dec 31, 2023

Illustrations

Image, Mar 3, 2023

Imperial and geopolitical relationships in Iñupiaq climate change narratives: extinction and cultural survival in The Last Days of Shishmaref

Image, Mar 3, 2023

Biographies of Contributors

Image, Mar 3, 2023

Petrochemical America' by Richard Misrach & Kate Orff

Dandelion, Dec 10, 2013

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New South Wales Government Printer

Routledge eBooks, 2007

This short entry for Routledge's Encyclopedia of Nineteenth-Century Photography charts the ph... more

Learning support: Student perceptions and preferences

Art, Design and Communication in Higher Education, Dec 1, 2010

The University of Gloucestershire accepts no liability for any infringement of intellectual prope... more

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In conversation with Olaf Otto Becker

transcript Verlag eBooks, Dec 31, 2020

Since the late 1990s, Olaf Otto Becker (b. 1959- ) has been photographing landscape scenery in Ic... more Since the late 1990s, Olaf Otto Becker (b. 1959- ) has been photographing landscape scenery in Iceland and Greenland with the intention to document how these landscapes are changing. Becker&#39;s photography captures the changes wrought by anthropogenically driven climate change, most notably by capturing the retreat of glaciers. Becker&#39;s practice, which foregrounds an aesthetic response to place, also photographs agricultural and urban landscapes, situating nature as part of our global economy. Images of living spaces contextualise human dwellings and living patterns for many people across the globe. This narrative is further elaborated upon in Becker&#39;s later projects, and discussed in the interview, which explores primary forests, deforestation, and the planting of urban spaces, but also situating his output within the context of global economies. This first in-depth interview with Becker discusses the evolution of his practice, his commitment to climate and environmental issues, and how this relates to the way the developed world treats nature as a resource in both the global north and the global south. The interview also investigates Becker&#39;s process of making images and engages with both the documentary and constructed strands of his photographs. New insights, such as the images&#39; relationship to time (both in terms of photography, and the deep time of geology) and the uncanny nature of some of the re-photographed sites emerges, offering new insights into Becker&#39;s practice.

In a World Fit for Humans? Posthumanism and the Nature-Culture Continuum in the <i>Prix Pictet</i>

Photography and Culture, Mar 16, 2021

is a photographer, writer and academic based at the University of Gloucestershire. Peck has had a... more is a photographer, writer and academic based at the University of Gloucestershire. Peck has had a long-standing interest in the landscape and the environment and is particularly interested in political ecology and philosophies that explore non-binary approaches to human/nature relationships. Her photographic work has been exhibited in the UK and she has contributed images, articles and reviews to

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Olaf Otto Becker in conversation with Julia Peck

transcript Verlag eBooks, Sep 30, 2020

Since the late 1990s, Olaf Otto Becker (b. 1959- ) has been photographing landscape scenery in Ic... more Since the late 1990s, Olaf Otto Becker (b. 1959- ) has been photographing landscape scenery in Iceland and Greenland with the intention to document how these landscapes are changing. Becker’s photography captures the changes wrought by anthropogenically driven climate change, most notably by capturing the retreat of glaciers. Becker’s practice, which foregrounds an aesthetic response to place, also photographs agricultural and urban landscapes, situating nature as part of our global economy. Images of living spaces contextualise human dwellings and living patterns for many people across the globe. This narrative is further elaborated upon in Becker’s later projects, and discussed in the interview, which explores primary forests, deforestation, and the planting of urban spaces, but also situating his output within the context of global economies. This first in-depth interview with Becker discusses the evolution of his practice, his commitment to climate and environmental issues, and how this relates to the way the developed world treats nature as a resource in both the global north and the global south. The interview also investigates Becker’s process of making images and engages with both the documentary and constructed strands of his photographs. New insights, such as the images’ relationship to time (both in terms of photography, and the deep time of geology) and the uncanny nature of some of the re-photographed sites emerges, offering new insights into Becker’s practice.

Spaces of the Anthropocene? Photography’s representations of environmental degradation and some progressive developments

The geological epoch of the Anthropocene has its persuasive detractors, and critiques of the conc... more The geological epoch of the Anthropocene has its persuasive detractors, and critiques of the concept include questions about the unequal ways that the human global population have contributed to climate change and environmental degradation. In addition to that the very term the ‘Anthropocene,’ whilst aiming to bring to consciousness the myriad ways that humans have contributed to the changing environment, keeps anthropocentric concerns firmly at the fore. Many argue, including Donna Haraway and T.J. Demos, that this is a time when we need alternative ways of thinking and being that facilitate understanding of, and engagements with, the non-human and non-living; such approaches also encourage future-thinking and imagining. The Anthropocene has become an important concept for photographic practitioners, not least those concerned with large-scale environmental degradation. Such photography, however, risks perpetuating both anthropocentric and defeatist depictions of degraded landscapes and acts of mourning. This paper, then, undertakes a brief analysis of some current landscape practices, including Edward Burtynsky’s Anthropocene (2018) and Marcus Coates’ Dawn Chorus (2007). This short paper argues that Coates’ Dawn Chorus more rightly belongs to the Chthulucene: a multispecies and unfinished process that emphasises the connected and the contingent, the material and agentic in the name of creative survival.

The documentary landscape and the representation of human-nature relationships: being ecological in the photographs of Lucas Foglia

The University of Gloucestershire accepts no liability for any infringement of intellectual prope... more

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Pulletop and Thornthwaite: Photography, Taste and Class Mobility in 19th Century New South Wales

John William Lindt’s Curious Engagement with New Guinea

This paper aims to assess the multiple discourses that John William Lindt’s photographic interest... more This paper aims to assess the multiple discourses that John William Lindt’s photographic interest in New Guinea encompassed, connecting the picturesque, commercial and anthropological interests evident in his images. Lindt travelled to New Guinea in 1885 with Sir Peter Scratchley to photograph the indigenous inhabitants of New Guinea when New Guinea’s status as a British Protectorate was finally established. Lindt’s resulting photographs circulated in a number of forms, including photograph albums, large exhibition prints and postcards as well as in the book Picturesque New Guinea (1887). Lindt was a supreme promoter and it is likely that he had promotional interests in mind, encouraging acceptance and interest in New Guinea as a commercial enterprise and as a site of scholarly and anthropological study. This paper will explore the discourses that Lindt’s photographs and writings intersected with, examining notions of indigenous subjectivity. This will also be put in the context of Lindt’s papers for the Australasian Branch of the Royal Geographical Society (Victoria), which promoted New Guinea as a site for investment and agricultural development. Lindt’s images will be assessed in the light of his extensive written statements but will be placed alongside potential signs of indigenous subjectivity.

Artwash and Influence: Photography and Climate Change in the Prix Pictet

Family and Field Work: J.S.P. Ramsay’s Photograph Album

MuseumsEtc eBooks, 2013

For amateur bird photographers during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, field ph... more For amateur bird photographers during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, field photography of birds was not only technically challenging, it was also a social activity involving convivial camaraderie and masculine companionship. In the case of J.S.P. Ramsay, fieldwork was also an activity that he shared with his wife, Ethel. Ethel, Ramsay and his family appear intermittently throughout an album that records Ramsay’s life and activities from approximately 1904 through to the early 1930s. This chapter aims to analyse the album through orality. Martha Langford’s useful work on photography albums and orality enables the different social aspects of amateur photography and natural history to be examined and related to each other. Through reading the album structurally it is possible to demonstrate the networks of social activity and knowledge exchange that Ramsay engaged in. The different types of photographs, and its repetitive structure, suggests both professional and personal use. Ramsay’s photography, like much ornithological photography of this period, is seen to be the product of social relationships that include familial relations and the album becomes a trace of Ramsay’s social activities. Ramsay’s album, being constructed during a period of change for amateurs, is an instructive tool for analysing how ‘serious’ amateurs engaged with professional networks of ornithology and photography. Indeed, snapshooters were superseding Victorian gentlemen amateurs in photography and ornithology was becoming more professional. Yet as Peter Buse has noted, wildlife photography was (and still is) one means of proving oneself to be a serious, or aspirational, amateur rather than snapshooter; Ramsay was able to use the networks of ornithology as an outlet for his aspiring naturalist self. Indeed, in his early life Ramsay wanted to be a naturalist (he was the son of a prominent Australian naturalist, E.P. Ramsay) but insufficient income meant that a career as a naturalist was impossible. Ramsay’s interest in photography in his boyhood was spurred by his interest in ornithology and like many late nineteenth century ornithologists he turned away from collecting skins, eggs and nests, to photography. As an adult, Ramsay operated a successful photo processing business and his business success enabled him to undertake ornithological field trips and keep up his ornithological photography. In similarity to other amateur bird photographers, he had a keen interest in technology and home-spun technical solutions. Ramsay published several scholarly articles in his lifetime, which he illustrated with his own photographs, and provided images for other naturalists’ publishing ventures. The album under discussion here records Ramsay’s life and photography in the earlier part of his life and provides a dynamic means of unpacking and interpreting his photographic and ornithological activities. Ramsay’s photograph album enables the amateur photographer/naturalist in the early twentieth century to be examined. Ramsay’s life, whilst in some respects entirely typical of amateur photographers and naturalists, enables the networks of the family, photography and ornithology to be unpacked within a historical understanding of amateurs in the early twentieth century.

An aesthetic regime of hope: reading Richard Misrach’s and Guillermo Galindo’s "Border Cantos

The University of Gloucestershire accepts no liability for any infringement of intellectual prope... more

Download

Kruger, Johan Friedrich Carl (Fred)

Routledge eBooks, 2008

A short biographical and historical account of the photographic activities of Johan (John) Kruger... more

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

transcript Verlag eBooks, Dec 31, 2018

Download

Petrochemical America by Richard Misrach and Kate Orff, New York, Aperture, 2012

Book review: Petrochemical America by Richard Misrach and Kate Orff New York, Aperture, 2012, 216... more

Preface and Acknowledgements

transcript Verlag eBooks, Dec 31, 2023

Illustrations

Image, Mar 3, 2023

Imperial and geopolitical relationships in Iñupiaq climate change narratives: extinction and cultural survival in The Last Days of Shishmaref

Image, Mar 3, 2023

Biographies of Contributors

Image, Mar 3, 2023

Petrochemical America' by Richard Misrach & Kate Orff

Dandelion, Dec 10, 2013

Download

New South Wales Government Printer

Routledge eBooks, 2007

This short entry for Routledge's Encyclopedia of Nineteenth-Century Photography charts the ph... more

Learning support: Student perceptions and preferences

Art, Design and Communication in Higher Education, Dec 1, 2010

The University of Gloucestershire accepts no liability for any infringement of intellectual prope... more

Download

In conversation with Olaf Otto Becker

transcript Verlag eBooks, Dec 31, 2020

In a World Fit for Humans? Posthumanism and the Nature-Culture Continuum in the <i>Prix Pictet</i>

Photography and Culture, Mar 16, 2021

Download

Olaf Otto Becker in conversation with Julia Peck

transcript Verlag eBooks, Sep 30, 2020

Since the late 1990s, Olaf Otto Becker (b. 1959- ) has been photographing landscape scenery in Ic... more Since the late 1990s, Olaf Otto Becker (b. 1959- ) has been photographing landscape scenery in Iceland and Greenland with the intention to document how these landscapes are changing. Becker’s photography captures the changes wrought by anthropogenically driven climate change, most notably by capturing the retreat of glaciers. Becker’s practice, which foregrounds an aesthetic response to place, also photographs agricultural and urban landscapes, situating nature as part of our global economy. Images of living spaces contextualise human dwellings and living patterns for many people across the globe. This narrative is further elaborated upon in Becker’s later projects, and discussed in the interview, which explores primary forests, deforestation, and the planting of urban spaces, but also situating his output within the context of global economies. This first in-depth interview with Becker discusses the evolution of his practice, his commitment to climate and environmental issues, and how this relates to the way the developed world treats nature as a resource in both the global north and the global south. The interview also investigates Becker’s process of making images and engages with both the documentary and constructed strands of his photographs. New insights, such as the images’ relationship to time (both in terms of photography, and the deep time of geology) and the uncanny nature of some of the re-photographed sites emerges, offering new insights into Becker’s practice.

Spaces of the Anthropocene? Photography’s representations of environmental degradation and some progressive developments

The documentary landscape and the representation of human-nature relationships: being ecological in the photographs of Lucas Foglia

The University of Gloucestershire accepts no liability for any infringement of intellectual prope... more

Download

Pulletop and Thornthwaite: Photography, Taste and Class Mobility in 19th Century New South Wales

John William Lindt’s Curious Engagement with New Guinea

Artwash and Influence: Photography and Climate Change in the Prix Pictet

Family and Field Work: J.S.P. Ramsay’s Photograph Album

MuseumsEtc eBooks, 2013

An aesthetic regime of hope: reading Richard Misrach’s and Guillermo Galindo’s "Border Cantos

The University of Gloucestershire accepts no liability for any infringement of intellectual prope... more

Download

Eco-Aesthetics: Art, Literature and Architecture in a Period of Climate Change - Book Review

Why it does not have to be in focus: Modern photography explained

Petrochemical America by Richard Misrach and Kate Orff

Photography's Time Lag: Challenging the Pastness and Passivity in the Representation of Climate Change and Other Environmental Disasters

This paper argues for a sustained ecological approach to be developed in relation to the photogra... more This paper argues for a sustained ecological approach to be developed in relation to the photographic representation of climate change and other environmental disasters. Following Jane Bennett’s thesis in Vibrant Matter (2010) that we need to find ways to acknowledge the agency of all factors that are relevant to understanding ecology, I wish to propose that photography can foster an understanding of the agency of the environment in which we live and produce thoughtful, reflective practice that challenges pristine notions of wilderness. As has already been extensively commented upon in relation to the photographic depiction of climate change and ecological disaster, photography is limited in its ability to help viewers to imagine future environmental impact because it represents the past and struggles to represent largely invisible phenomena, such as climate change, in a timely manner.
This paper argues that Richard Misrach and Kate Orff’s project Petrochemical America (2012) signals some important strategies that other climate and environmental photographers could utilise. Their book systematically uses photography, and in the scenes of environmental degradation, human and social links are made to foster the understanding that we are looking at an image of ecology rather than nature ravaged. In addition to the titles of images, captions and overall contextualisation of the project, Kate Orff’s team Scape produce a series of diagrams called Throughlines that situate the subject of petrochemical impact in the Mississippi River corridor. The cumulative impact of Misrach’s photographic approach, combined with the effective and systematic linking of his images to other forms of relevant information, produces an understanding of environment as not only inextricably linked to human activity and habitation, but as an environment which also has agency in its influence on human living patterns.

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J.S.P. Ramsay: amateur ornithological photography and the photo processing industry

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