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

• Main Author: Peck, Julia
• Other Authors: Goldie, Chris, White, Darcy
• Format: Book Part
• Language: English
• Published: Transcript Verlag 2018
• Subjects: N Visual arts (General) For photography; see TR; TR Photography; Arctic; Ewing
• Online Access: https://eprints.glos.ac.uk/5913/; https://eprints.glos.ac.uk/5913/15/5913-Peck-%282018%29-%20Landscape-photograph-in-the-web-of-life.pdf

Olaf Otto Becker, a photographer renown for his photographs of the Arctic north, has recently turned his attention to the forests of Indonesia, Bolivia, Brazil and Australia. As William Ewing has noted (2015), perhaps this change in direction is logical given that the melting of the Arctic is partly connected to the destruction of the world’s major forests and that Becker’s own work has become increasingly preoccupied with charting human-led changes to the environment. Taking an overview of Becker’s output from Broken Line (2007) to Reading the Landscape (2014), I argue that Becker’s approach can be read as an attempt to depict the relationship between human and nature, the everyday and the sublime in a time of neoliberalised capital. Using Jason Moore’s theories of cheap capital, I argue that Becker’s photographs visualise human/nature relationships that transcend traditional binary concepts that promote the idea of humans being separate from nature. Indeed, Becker visualises landscapes that are co-produced with nature and humans.