Aesthetic practices in the climate crisis: Intervening in consensual frameworks of the sensible through images

For many of us in Western countries, climate change is still invisible and not distinctly perceivable by senses in our immediate living environment. However, climate change is continuously sensed through visuals in different media spaces, ranging from news media to social media. Images play an important role in communicating climate issues, as visualisations have the potential to make the abstract and sometimes distant issue more tangible (O’Neill & Nicholson-Cole, 2009). Photographs, in particular, have alerted people to the environmental crisis: They have served as a means of popularisation, especially in constructing social relations between different actors and in evoking emotions (Seppänen & Väliverronen, 2003). Indeed, Smith and Joffe's (2012) research on the British public showed that people's first spontaneous thoughts on climate change often reflect the stereotypical images used in the media. This stresses the importance of visual media content in making sense of the climate crisis.

At least within the Western world, a limited set of images has represented climate change in the public discourse (e.g., Born, 2019; Wang et al., 2018). Stereotypical journalistic representations of climate change have included, for instance, polar bears, icebergs, floods, and droughts (Kangas, 2016; Smith & Joffe, 2009). These representations have taken part in a discourse of death and destruction in which certain default visual figures, such as the polar bear,

In this paper, the representation of polar bears in the media is not addressed as such. The issue is complicated and has been the focus of past research in itself (e.g., Born, 2019; Yusoff, 2010). However, a short note is in order here, as it has been suggested that in images, polar bears no longer represent only themselves but rather are anthropomorphised subjects of identification whose suffering functions as a stand-in for humanity's problems (Born, 2019).

In addition to visualisations of climate change impacts, media imagery includes visualisations depicting climate change causes and solutions. These visualisations tend to emphasise the role of energy production: warming is depicted as a result of polluting energy production (e.g., smokestacks) and “clean” technologies (e.g., solar and wind power) are offered as solutions to climate change (Kangas, 2016; see also O’Neill et al., 2013). The emphasis on technological causes as well as solutions in the imagery, for their part, have participated in the distant and abstract discourse of ecological modernisation (Kangas, 2016).

Along with images of destruction and technology, images of politicians are among the most common climate change visualisations (Metag et al., 2016; Smith & Joffe, 2009). Yet again, previous research has indicated that images of politicians may make climate change feel unimportant and even undermine feelings of self-efficacy in respect to the climate crisis (O’Neill et al., 2013). Overall, there is an abundance of research suggesting that apart from politicians, public figures, scientists, and protesting activists, there is an absence of human stories in climate imagery (see Wang et al., 2018). There are also opposite findings; for instance, in their review of UK tabloids, Smith and Joffe (2009) found that the affected public were commonly featured in climate imagery.

Further, media representations of climate change have relied on imagery produced and induced by nongovernmental organisations. For instance, Green-peace uses the visual framing of their own actions as a communicative strategy (Doyle, 2007). More recent examples are performances and protests organised by, for instance, Extinction Rebellion, German climate justice movement Ende Gälende, and the Fridays for Future movement, which have increased the amount of imagery of climate activism and political participation in the media. However, these tactics may fall prey to the limitations of event-based reportage (see Doyle, 2007). Research has also suggested that images of “typical environmentalists” only resonate with activists and campaigners themselves (Corner et al., 2015: 36).

It must be noted that the above-described conception of existing imagery is limited, as there are notable patterns in past research (Schäfer & Schlichting, 2014; Wang et al., 2018). Firstly, as the media coverage tends to focus on certain events (such as release of reports from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change), so do the media reviews. Secondly, the majority of the research centres on North America and European countries, leaving us with limited understanding of the differences in media portrayals in different parts of the world. Thirdly – although there are also exceptions (e.g., Painter et al., 2018) – to date, research has mainly focused on print media (instead of digital media), particularly broadsheet newspapers. In addition, current understanding of media portrayals stems from research with a focus on language-based communication and with less focus on imagery (Wang et al., 2018).

Despite the deficiencies of past research, there is a shared understanding among researchers that current climate change visualisation leaves room for improvement (Wang et al., 2018). The problem of visualising climate change boils down to communicating environmental issues that are both temporal (long-term and developmental) and unseen (not always visible), through the medium of photography that privileges the “here and now” of the visual (Doyle, 2007). Although some attempts to solve the “image problem” of climate change have already taken place – for example, through portraying real people, local climate change impacts, and climate change causes at scale (Corner et al., 2015) – it appears that achieving a more ecologically sustainable future will require further revisions in our aesthetics (see Soper, 2008).

This article is an attempt to advance the discussion on the role of aesthetics in communicating the climate crisis. Our starting point for this is Jacques Ranciére's notion of “the politics of aesthetics”. For Ranciére, the meaning of aesthetics goes beyond identifying and thinking about art and refers to the fundamental way the sensible experience is constituted – it is “the system of a priori forms determining what presents itself to sense experience” (Ranciére, 2019: 8). Thus, aesthetics offers a key to understanding how the experience of a common-sensible world is constructed and who are able to share this experience (see Ranciére & Gage, 2019).

We approach aesthetics as practices and conceive visual journalism and visual arts as specific spheres in which aesthetic practices are configured. Aesthetic practices may be regarded as ways of “doing” and “making”, that is, as forms of arrangement and distribution of what is perceived by the senses (Ranciére, 2019; Yusoff, 2010). The common forms of aesthetic practices determine what can be perceived and experienced (Yusoff, 2010), that is, “what is visible and audible as well as what can be said, thought, made and done” (Ranciére, 2019: 89). Thus, aesthetic practices “constitute the social and its possible spheres of social action” (Yusoff, 2010: 80).

The potential of resistance in aesthetics and the attempt to intervene in consensual frameworks of the sensible are at the centre of Ranciére's thinking. In the context of climate change, we understand these consensual frameworks as established and commonly shared ways of describing and interpreting the common world of which the existing journalistic imagery is a product (see Ranciére, 2019). Hence, in the spirit of Ranciére, in this article, we want to question the forms of description and interpretation that have become self-evident and ask the following questions: What kind of aesthetic practices could intervene in consensual frameworks of the sensible? And more specifically, how could current journalistic visualisations of climate change be renewed through these practices?

Our discussion begins with a review of two problematic consensual frameworks that we see as influencing current journalistic representations of climate change: human-centredness and consumption-centredness. Human-centredness refers to the view of humans as unique world-dominating agents who are separate from nature (see Bennett, 2010), whereas consumption-centredness deems consumption as a central human activity and an inherent purpose of life (Burroughs & Rindfleisch, 2002; Soper, 2007b). We derive both consensual frameworks and intervening aesthetic practices from eco-philosophical literature. These frameworks are not limited to climate change imagery in the media, but rather they are philosophical, economical, and psychological frameworks embedded in contemporary Western culture.

First, we address human-centredness through two aesthetic practices: 1) revealing connectedness of humans and other beings, which includes understanding the connection between human behaviour and the thriving or suffering of other beings (see Haraway, 2016; Lorenzoni et al., 2006); and 2) recognising agency of the other beings – also non-human – and reimagining agency in more diverse ways (see Bennett, 2010; Ghosh, 2016; Latour, 2018). Second, we address consumption-centredness through two additional aesthetic practices: 3) compromising the attractions of consumerism through associations between consumerist lifestyles and their negative aspects (see Soper, 2008); and 4) illuminating alternatives by revealing post-consumerist lifestyles and alternative hedonism (see Craig, 2016; Soper, 2008).

For illustrative examples of these aesthetic practices, we turn to visual arts. These artworks are examples to inspire thought, and each of them in their own way carry possibilities of renewing the representations of climate change in visual journalism. Visual arts may stimulate creative, out-of-the box thinking, produce emotional responses, and engage people to action (see Roosen et al., 2018). Art may also intervene norms and consensual frameworks by stimulating the redefinition of norms and values and creating moments of contemplation that are necessary to break out of routine behaviour (see Roosen et al., 2018). In the conclusions, we return to the sphere of visual journalism to reflect on how current journalistic visualisations of climate change could be renewed through the suggested aesthetic practices.

Amidst the anthropogenic climate change, “nature” is understood as a human construction that more than ever needs our protection. However, this understanding relies on an illusionary stable power structure in which humans find themselves at the apex of the great chain of being (Ballard, 2015). The assumption of a human–non-human divide means that agency has been attributed to human subjects, while the non-human world has been rendered as the mute object of human intervention (Cameron et al., 2011). The problem of the human-centred perception is that human needs are deemed more important than non-human needs, and all matter is viewed as mere material for human consumption. Jane Bennett (2010) argues that the image of dead or thoroughly instrumentalised matter feeds human hubris and fantasies of conquest and consumption by preventing us from sensing a fuller range of the non-human powers circulating around and within human bodies.

The new materialist viewpoint of recognising agency of other (also non-human) beings may be criticised for not taking into account the social injustices imbued in carbon-capitalism and the underlying universalistic view on humanity in the Anthropocene. For instance, Yusoff (2016: 20) states that the Anthropocene relies on a certain notion of the “human” as collective under the sign of man. This “we” of species-being and belonging presumes an uncomplicated and undifferentiated inheritance (Yusoff, 2016: 20). However, we do not see our approach as contradicting the need to expose social hegemonies and injustices of carbon-capitalism, but rather we point to the fact that there is also value in expanding the view of justice towards non-human forms of life (see Chakrabarty, 2017).

The framework of human-centredness resonates in a paradoxical way with climate change imagery. Within climate change visualisations, there appears to be an absence of human stories (Wang et al., 2018). To date, the role of human actors has mainly been played by politicians (Metag et al., 2016) and activists taking part in climate strikes or demonstrations (Barclay & Amaria, 2019). More recently, images depicting climate change impacts on real people have appeared, following the suggestion that showing “real people” is crucial for effective visual communication on climate change (Corner et al., 2015). However, human-centeredness is not only depicted in images, but serves as an underlying presumption of understanding climate change as a crisis that the human civilization has caused and will eventually resolve with the help of technological innovations. Even the discussion of whether climate change is human induced or not underlines the human-centred framework. In the following, we present two aesthetic practices that could intervene in the consensual framework of human-centredness, namely revealing connectedness and recognising agency.

Recognising agency

Another way of intervening in the consensual framework of human-centredness is recognising agency of non-human beings and reimagining agency in alternative ways (see Bennett, 2010; Ghosh, 2016). This calls us to question the agency of humans as the primary actors in the Anthropocene. Bruno Latour (2018) suggests the Terrestrial as a new political actor, meaning that the Earth, or “geo”, is understood as an agent that is no longer stable but is participating in history, fighting back and reacting to human reactions. Jane Bennett (2010) develops the idea of vital materiality, that is, the capacity of things not only to impede or block the will and designs of humans but also act as forces with trajectories, propensities, and tendencies of their own. For Bennett, even things that produce (helpful or harmful) effects in humans and other bodies may have agency. Bennett presents the case for edible matter as an actant operating inside and alongside humankind and exerting influence, for instance, on moods, dispositions, and decisions. She reminds us that already Darwin treated worms as actants operating in nature and in history and points out that even electricity or metals can be considered actants (Bennett, 2010).

Figure 1

The idea of non-human and inanimate particles being actants has recently become obvious during the Covid-19 crisis: even though airborne nitrogen dioxide plummeted over China (Earth Observatory/NASA, 2020), pollution levels in fact rose as lower nitrogen levels added to the formation of ozone, and this led to an increase in chemical reactions (Pellinen, 2020). The agency of carbon-dioxide has obviously been prominent in discussing global warming and a cause of debates; some climate denialists, in fact, refuse the agency of carbon-dioxide as a warming agent. In the following, we present examples of visualising non-human agency in visual arts.

One example of visualising the agency of animals is photographer James Mollison's series of close-up portraits of the great apes (James Mollision, 2004). Mollison has photographed 50 ape portraits using the aesthetic of the passport photograph and its ubiquitous style inferring the idea of identity. The direct gaze of the great apes suggests seeing the animals as individuals. Each ape has distinctive features and individual traits, and the portraits challenge the human-centred framework by considering the apes as personalities rather than representatives of a species. The apes are also looking at the spectator directly, and in this sense, they adopt a more communicative stance rather than just being the mere objects of a nature documentary. Mollison's series also challenges us to question the way humans look at the world, through certain perspectives and visual formats which place humans as the central agent in the world.

Photographer Loreal Prystaj has portrayed the human as part of nature in the series Reflecting on Nature (Loreal Prystaj, 2016). She places herself in environments where nature seems to be looking at itself in the mirror. The visually striking images both show the beauty of different landscapes and place the human as an object of nature's gaze. Prystaj has covered the human's head from the image with a mirror, making the human a type of object or non-actor in the images (see Figure 2). This differs from the traditional aesthetics of nature photography, where pristine landscapes are presented as an aesthetic object for the human gaze (Giblett & Tolonen, 2014). In the description of her work, Prystaj asks what nature would see if it looked at itself. Would human identity stand out or would we actually be only small details: beauty marks or blemishes?

In a different way, artist Tuula Närhinen studies the agency of the wind in her video installation Local Winds. Närhinen uses a self-made kite, equipped with an action camera, as she sets out “to record the movement and the breath of the wind on video” (Tuula Närhinen, 2016). Giving sight to the kite and wind through using an action camera means sensing or encountering a material, animal, or “radical other” through senses. The video installation brings forth the interaction between the perceiver and the world. The kite with the video camera presents the landscape from an atmospheric perspective that reveals the airborne sound and point of view peculiar to the turbulent and unruly mountain winds. The video installation Local Winds illuminates the sensations of being in contact with forces and elements of nature.

Figure 2

Even though today it is well recognised that consumerist lifestyles within the capitalist economy are a major contributor to ecological crises (Fischer et al., 2012; Soper, 2008), consumption still appears as a central human activity and a culturally accepted means of seeking success, happiness, and a good life (e.g., Burroughs & Rindfleisch, 2002). However, many theorists would argue that consumption is compensatory for different types of existential loss, may it be of meaning or identity (Soper, 2008). In fact, previous research suggests that the pursuit of material possessions fails as a strategy to increase pleasure, well-being or meaning of life (Burroughs & Rindfleisch, 2002; Kashdan & Breen, 2007; Lee & Ahn, 2016).

Also, Ranciére (2019) talks about the discourse on the spectacle and the idea that we are all enclosed in the field of commodity and advertising images. He argues that this discussion generates an antidemocratic discourse, promotes the incapacity of the masses for political intervention, and further, nurtures a discourse of the uselessness of artistic practice because it suggests that everything is dependent on the market. He stresses the necessity of getting out of this discourse, which is for him a discourse of “political impotence”.

Today, many accept that consumption is, in fact, a site of political agency (Soper, 2008). In this view, consumption choices may be understood as acts of everyday activism. Ethical consumption may, for instance, moralise economic markets and produce knowledge about socioeconomic and ecological consequences of production (Craig, 2016). However, ethical or ecological consumption does not intervene in the consensual consumption-centred framework. In current journalistic media representations of the climate crisis, consumption-centredness manifests itself, at least, in images of technological innovations and in sustainable consumption options offered for individual consumers, such as renewable energy, electric cars, or products made of recycled materials. The following aesthetic practices attempt to intervene in this consumption-centred framework.

Compromising the attractions of consumerism

A central challenge in calling our current consumerist lifeform into question is the temporal and spatial distance between unsustainable and sustainable behaviours and their consequences (Niemelä-Nyrhinen & Seppänen, 2019). In the Western world, we do not sense many of the consequences of our consumption choices, as they, in fact, take place either at a different time or in a different place in the world. As a result, they are relatively easy to put aside from one's mind. Consequently, compromising the attractions of consumerism through making or reinforcing associations between consumerist lifestyles and their negative aspects is one way of intervening in the consumption-centred framework.

Soper (2008: 580) has suggested that for a “revolution” of sensibility to take place, we need aesthetic reordering “whereby the commodities once perceived as enticingly glamorous come gradually instead to be cumbersome and ugly in virtue of their association with unsustainable resource use, noise, toxicity or their legacy of unrecyclable waste”. Compromising the attractions of consumerism thus rises from consumption itself, as – already for a small but growing group of people – the consumerist, high-speed, work-dominated, materialistic lifestyles are being compromised by their negative by-products, such as noise, pollution, stress, and excessive waste (Soper, 2008).

An apt example of emphasising the associations between a prevalent form of consumption and its negative by-products is offered by an ecological artwork called Sun & Sea (Marina), an opera created in 2019 by filmmaker and director Rugilë Barzdžiukaitë, writer Vaiva Grainytë, and artist and composer Lina Lapelytë. The opera is designed to be performed in a space where the audience watches it from a balcony or mezzanine. They look down to a brightly lit artificial sandy beach setting, populated by ordinary people spending their day lazily lying on their towels and lounge chairs (see Figure 3). Putting on sunscreen, reading books, looking at their smartphones, playing, listening to music – just lying under the sun, doing the things you do when you are on a beach, in a calm, unhurried manner. The setting evokes an association of a museum's live diorama depicting the Anthropocene (Barone, 2019).

Figure 3

The vacationers in their colourful swimsuits, on their pastel towels, with their plastic bottles of water all paint a picture of our conception of contemporary leisure and enjoyment. In the sun, the lazy, relaxed people gently sing out loud their thoughts and stories. The libretto consists of pleasant stories and small inconveniences that slowly grow and compound with broader anxieties of work-centred life, waste, and anthropogenic climate change. The words sung associate the visual setting with the end of our planet. The work does not preach or teach; it simply puts things on a stage for people to see them. There is no fuss – just negligence, ignorance, laziness, and an audience watching from a distance.

All in all, the visual setting seems very familiar, if not from one's own experience, then at least from travelling sites and brochures. There is nothing spectacular in the visuality of the performance: it is simple, banal, ordinary, and mundane. Perhaps just because of that it is powerful. There is a natural, miraculous site – the beach – occupied by self-indulgent humans. And there is the sun and the sea that indulge us – until they might destroy us.

Another example is offered by Andrea Hasler's installation Burdens of Excess, which consists of trendy, must-have design accessories remodelled with anatomical wax to resemble mounds of flesh (Andrea Hasler, 2013). The installation works on two levels. Firstly, by making the connection between luxury items and human flesh, Hasler clearly points to the consumerist principle of “you are what you own”. In this way, it resembles the iconic work by Barbara Kruger from 1987 stating “I shop therefore I am” (Artsy, 1987/2021). Both of these artworks direct their viewer's attention towards the questionable existential claim that the defining factor of human existence is that we buy things. However, Hasler's installation goes one step further, as the repulsiveness of the sculptures seems to stain the accessories. Through her work, the accessories that used to be desired become ugly, as they are associated with disgusting mounds of human flesh.

Illuminating alternatives

As already indicated above, pleasure in contemporary Western culture is a complicated issue. The promise of it is everywhere in our mediated culture, and at the same time, it has become more and more elusive in our hectic, work-dominated, and economically uncertain existence (Craig, 2016). In other words, there is a growing sense – even though still in the minority – that important pleasures and sources of gratification are being lost or unrealised because of prevalent consumerist lifestyles (Soper, 2008). Thus, another way of intervening in the consensual consumption-centred framework is an aesthetic practice of illuminating alternatives by revealing post-consumerist lifestyles and their pleasures (see Soper 2007b).

Soper (2007a; 2008; 2012) has suggested a concept of “alternative hedonism” for rethinking the good life. Alternative hedonism basically means alterations in the conception of self-interests and seems to involve at least moving from material to more spiritual, and from spectacular to more mundane, interests. It involves an altered conception of what it is to have a “high” standard of living (Soper, 2008). It appears that even though the pleasures of post-consumerism are emphasised in literature, blogs, or documentaries addressing, for example, the simplicity or minimalism movement, in the journalistic media, they remain marginal (Craig, 2016). Thus, it seems there is space for new anti- or post-consumerist imagery that makes alternative lifestyles more visible, and further, more thinkable and possible.

This new post-consumerist imagery could depict “seeds of good Anthropocene” intervening in the dominance of dystopian visions of irreversible environmental degradation (see Bennett et al., 2016) that follow from the political impotence set by a consumption-centred framework. Imagining life outside the basic structures of a capitalist economy might seem impossible, which is exactly why making post-consumerist lifestyles visible adds to the fields of possible action. According to Soper (2007b), we hear far too little of what might be gained if we moved away from our current obsession with consumerist gratifications and pursued an alternative way of life.

One example of illuminating alternatives is a photo reportage called Forest Family by photographer Touko Hujanen. The reportage documents the everyday life of Lasse Norlund, Maria Dorff, and their two children, who live a self-sustainable life in Valtimo, located in eastern Finland. Hujanen's photographs show the harshness and the hard, physical work it takes to live a self-sustainable life, but they also show the beauty and delicate pleasures it contains. Norlund and Dorff themselves see that the benefits of self-sustainability are, above all, spiritual, such as the opportunity to alleviate climate change anxiety and strengthen the feeling of meaningfulness (Härkönen, 2019). For example, a photograph of Dorff and her son having a wash in a stream pictures a daily chore that, in the eyes of a city dweller, appears as a moment of magical togetherness between a mother and son (see Figure 4). Many of the photographs in the series have this nostalgic feeling of past times. However, they are not just nostalgic, but also contain elements that tie them to the present, such as solar panels attached to the roof of a traditionally handcrafted log house.

Figure 4

Similar projects, depicting alternative post-consumerist lifestyles, may be found from other documentary photographers as well. For instance, the photo series Downshifting in Belarus by Dmitrij Leltschuk (DL, 2020) pictures young families that have, in the words of the photographer, escaped consumerism and moved away from big cities to the countryside. The atmosphere in Leltschuk's photographs is quite similar when compared to Hujanen's Forest Family. The photographs share the nostalgic feeling and show both hard work and moments of enjoyment. However, instead of one family, there appears to be several families, which emphasises the communal possibilities of post-consumerist choices.

The possibility to choose post-consumerist lifestyles is highly context-bound. Making a sustainable choice is not solely a motivational question, but also depends on the available resources and opportunities (Moisander, 2007). In the Western context, post-consumerism may stem from escaping the “rat-race”, but for many inhabitants of developing countries, such choices are not possible or relevant, as even basic needs are not met. Further, Blühdorn (2017) offers a critical view towards discourses and experimental practices of post-capitalism, post-growth, and post-consumerism and argues that they do not offer any plausible perspective for a structural transformation of liberal consumer societies. In fact, they help to organise – contrary to their own self-perception and declared intentions – modern societies’ journey towards ever more social inequality and ecological destruction (Blühdorn, 2017). Nonetheless, consumption and lifestyle changes are an inevitable part of the individual and societal adjustments to climate change (Claudelin et al., 2018), and thus, perceiving visualisations of post-consumerism are needed to induce reflectivity in individuals to imagine alternative lifestyles.

Media representations of climate change have to date concentrated on the catastrophic effects, technological causes and solutions, and reduced human agency to limited actions. The fact that environmental issues are both temporal and unseen poses challenges for visualising climate change (Doyle, 2007). Furthermore, Rob Nixon (2011) situates the dilemmas of representing the slow violence of ecological degradation into the temporal templates of our spectacle-driven, 24/7 media life. Event-based catastrophes have a visceral, eye-catching, and page-turning power that representations of slow violence, unfolding over long periods of time, cannot match (Nixon, 2011). Further, media portrayals of smokestacks and technological solutions have failed to position climate change in the realm of possible action. How then do the aesthetic practices contribute to rethinking the visual representations of climate change in journalistic media?

In this article, we suggested four aesthetic practices which each in their own way intervene in two consensual frameworks of the sensible: human-centredness and consumption-centredness. The aesthetic practices are 1) revealing connectedness, 2) recognising agency, 3) compromising the attractions of consumerism, and 4) illuminating alternatives. We presented visual examples of each of these practices, which offer some alternative ways to represent agency and thus intervene in the consensual frameworks while breaking from the event-based and distant journalistic representations of climate change. Many examples fall in the realm of artistic photography, and in the following, we suggest some possibilities of applying these aesthetic practices to the journalistic media context.

Within the aesthetic practice of revealing connectedness, we gave examples of photography shifting the view from humans as separate entities in the world to finding connections with non-human entities. Agniezka Lepka's images seek to find similarities between humans and nature through close-up shots of human body parts, landscapes, and everyday objects. The journalistic equivalent could be visualising the similarities of humans and animals, plants, and natural elements. Perhaps these types of stories could best be executed through creating image-pairs that point out similarities and connections between the way humans, plants, and animals live, breath, and prosper, but also suffer the consequences of climate change. For instance, World Wildlife Fund Finland recently launched a campaign drawing parallels between humans, their constructed environments, and wildlife: A human eye was paired with an eye of a tiger, a highway with an erupting volcano, and a stock chart with a melting glacier (WWF, 2021); similar tactics could be used in journalistic media.

To illustrate the aesthetic practice of recognising agency, we presented examples that use visual photographic formats dedicated to humans (passport photography and portraits) to photograph other beings. This is a practice which could be used to replace the talking heads of politicians often present in climate change reporting (Metag et al., 2016). Through this type of practice, other beings could perhaps be given a presence in representing climate change, not only as stereotypes symbolising the decay of natural environments, the sixth extinction, or the perils of climate change. In our other examples, photographers gave the visual reins to non-human forces. In Loreal Prystaj's photography, the human is present in the landscapes, but nature is given agency through the mirror held by the human. Tuula Närhinen attached an action camera to a kite in order to visualise the movement of the wind and the human connected to it. Perhaps in order to create journalistic representation, cameras could be given to other living creatures, or at least the sight from other perspectives outside the human point of view could be mimicked.

Rob Nixon writes that confronting the slow violence of environmental problems requires giving figurative shape to formless threats whose fatal repercussions are dispersed across space and time. This would require creative ways of drawing public attention to catastrophic acts that are low in instant spectacle but high in long-term effects (Nixon, 2011). We argue that recognising and visualising the agency of toxins, natural forces, and other living beings could also illuminate the repercussions of climate change for humans in unequal settings.

The other consensual framework contested in our article was consumption-centredness. The aesthetic practice of compromising the attractions of consumerism was illustrated through examples of which neither were photographic: an opera and an installation. However, the idea of associating consumerism with its negative aspects could be applied to visual media content, too. It may be simply done by pairing photographs representing currently desired consumerist attractions with photographs of relevant negative associations, such as pollution, waste, or work-related stress. In fact, previous research has suggested that including local environmental problems with relevant solutions within the same media representations could be an effective means of political activation (Lorentzoni et al., 2006; O’Neill & Nicholson-Cole, 2009). Similarly, we suggest that visually combining problems with their causes may be effective in compromising the harmful attractions of consumerism.

The example images illustrating the practice of illuminating alternatives involved revealing post-consumerist lifestyles and their pleasures in photo report-ages. As such, the practice involves consideration of both what and how things are presented. Following Ranciére (2019), to make things visible is to make them possible. Further, emphasising alternative hedonism is likely to make alternative ways of being and doing not just more approachable, but also more realistic. Concerning the given examples, it seems important to note that the reportages consist of several photographs that have probably been taken over a long period of time. One isolated picture could hardly convey the same powerful story; however, repetitive single visual representations may amount to meaningful imagery in journalistic media.

Implementing these aesthetic practices in the sphere of visual journalism would mean changes to the core of journalism as an event-based practice. Reorganising the ways in which ecological degradation and climate change are journalistically covered would require expanding the understanding of journalistic photography from quickly capturing events “as they are” to slow, thought-out conceptual photography. This type of photography is aware of its own role and possibilities in making different forms of agency visible. In addition, editorial decisions could be more informed by how the arrangement of images – for example, into image pairs or collages – affects their meaning. Visual journalism could move from using catastrophic stock imagery to finding stories of climate change close by and documenting affected places and beings to local audiences.

Previous research has investigated the role of visual representations in promoting, for instance, salience and self-efficacy (Metag et al., 2016) and positive public engagement with climate change (O’Neill & Nicholson Cole, 2009). Clearly, promoting salience, self-efficacy, and engagement is a role that we as researchers would like to assign for aesthetic practices. However, we do not claim that the presented aesthetic practices would have specific effects. Following Bennett (2010), we suggest that cultural products (such as photographs) have the potential for creating “moments of sensuous enchantment” with the everyday world, which in turn may generate the motivational energy to move human agency. Furthermore, aesthetic practices may create new ways of understanding through perception:

Thus, the effect, the aesthetic effect, is not the effect of a work in the sense that a work should produce this energy for action or this particular form of deliberation about the situation. It's about creating forms of perception, forms of interpretation.

We realise that the practices offered in this article might be interim solutions, as, following Ranciére's (2019: 79) thoughts, there is no such thing as a final good practice of aesthetics. Rather, the relationship between the consensual and the subversive image is constantly shifting, and thus, one must, “at each moment, displace the displacement itself”.

As such, understanding aesthetics as politics means that not just specific types of political or activist photography – but all photography – is political. Thus, every photograph takes part in constructing consensual frameworks of the sensible or tries to intervene in them. Here lies an important realisation for journalistic photographers: even in the quest of objectivity, it is impossible to be non-political.

As researchers, we believe we have a role in making “visible” the hidden assumptions and frameworks behind climate communication and imagery, and in making suggestions on how to intervene in those assumptions and frameworks. Research has a role to play as a performative practice that can help bring into being a more differentiated world that offers “new possibilities for living and acting” (Gibson-Graham & Roelvink, 2010: 328, 342). As such, academic research is also political – it is activism. We agree with Fischer and colleagues (2012) that as researchers, rather than just describing the world's miserable fate, a more honest strategy is to ask ourselves what we can do to initiate change. We recommend that photographers and visual journalists take on the same strategy.