ENVS 3020 Advanced Writing in Environmental Studies (Vodehnal) - Rare and Distinctive Collections Virtual Visit

The Line is composed of photographs obtained by Palíndromo Mészáros six months after thirty-five million cubic meters of toxic waste were spilled by the Timföldgyár alumina factory on October 4, 2010, devastating Devecser and Kolontár villages. It could possibly be considered the biggest ecological catastrophe of Hungarian history

For more than two decades, David Maisel has photographed civilisation's aggressive advance across the American landscape. The sites he has pursued, the subjects he has discovered, and the abstract beauty he has confronted are all the more unfamiliar and disarming because of their aerial perspectives. Looking down from low-flying aircraft banking steeply over the terrain, Maisel constructs skewed landscapes that seem at times to have no horizons, no up or down, and no near or far. "The Lake Project" documents Maisel's work around Owens Lake. This arid expanse, located just east of the Sierra Nevadas, is for the most part a desiccated bed of mineral deposits. Drained for the water needs of Southern California, beginning in 1913, it now contributes carcinogenic particles to the atmosphere during 'dust events'. These are not normal landscapes, for they lack nearly all scale references that might ground the viewer into comprehensive geographical co-ordinates. There is no foreground, middle ground, or background. There is only the ground as seen from a low-flying aircraft, a surface teeming with malignant colours that one can almost taste, incredibly complex textures that one can almost feel, and delicate mineral traces that resemble organic arteries.

Across the Ravaged Land is the third and final volume in Nick Brandt's trilogy of books documenting the disappearing animals of eastern Africa. The book offers a darker vision of this world, still filled with a stunning beauty but now tragically tainted and fast disappearing at the hands of man. In addition to a range of starkly powerful animal portraits, Brandt introduces some new themes, as humans make an appearance for the first time. He also contributes two essays summing up his photographic odyssey, which has taken more than a decade of intensive work to complete.