ABSTRACT
With the worldwide growth of refugees owing to environmental transformation – defining the new term “climate refugees” – we confront a complex vector of causality, where climate change intersects with economic, socio-technological, biopolitical, and military-security factors. Yet the photographic imaging of migrants and refugees in media culture and artistic documentary produces an ongoing spectacle of misery. That spectacle, in turn, often contributes to a violent abstraction from that web of categories, excluding structural agents (states, militaries, and corporations as well as legal and economic infrastructures) from our understanding of the causal conditions behind dislocation. How might contemporary photographic culture contribute to an alteration of this cycle of “refugeeization,” instead placing the complex determinants of geopolitical displacement within the frame of the visible? If representation conditions policy, contexualized frequently by xenophobic and racist perceptions, and if climate refugees are predicted to grow exponentially in coming years, addressing this question now appears urgent.
