recycling

We were talking in class today - in advance of Rebecca Solnit's visit to Rutgers - about environmental photography, and how one might most effectively take photographs that would make one think about environmental issues.   We looked at the work of various photographers - Robert Adams's pioneering pictures of suburban tract houses and a drive in movie-theater set against Colorado's front range; Peter Goin's images of the toxic wasteland left behind when the US's first nuclear reactor was closed and left desolate and derelict; Richard Misrach's beautiful and haunting shots of the Salton Sea (somewhere that I've wanted to go and photograph ever since I saw them - but not having been there, can't imagine how one would not come away without them looking like a Misrach rip-off - maybe one would indeed need to attempt a rephotography project - but that's on the menu as a topic for Thursday's class on photography and time); Chris Jordan's piles and piles of abandoned cell phones and circuit boards, and images of shark's teeth arranged as chinese shark-painting - to draw attention to the hundreds of thousands of sharks killed daily for their fins.   And we looked, too, at various different parts of Subhankar Banerjee's Arctic Wildlife Refuge series, the images of caribou and sandpipers and polar bears rendered vulnerable, the tundra and icefloes and sand extraordinarily fragile and mutable, through the captions that accompany them.

One common theme in all of this was beauty - the conventional, National Parks style beauty of unspoiled land, but also the way in which ugliness can often be made to look stunning, or at least aesthetically attractive, by the camera.   It was hard to find anything around the streets of New Brunswick or Highland Park that quite matched up to that - somehow the greasetruck sausage growing white whiskery mold under a fir tree, or the trash can full of computer monitors at the back of - yes - a frat house didn't quite make the grade.   But this companionable set of neatly tied magazines, waiting patiently to be picked up in the morning on recycling day, seem positively proud of their organized, environmentally conscious credentials. I have, though, started to wonder about the destination and greenness - or otherwise - of a lot of recycling: what's the carbon footprint of a tanker that carries this newsprint, or bags of bottles and cans, off to China or wherever they go?   How would one photograph that?