ABSTRACT
This framing essay argues that our view of the world has long been a holistic overview: sublime, totalizing, and largely indifferent to granular detail. From NASA photographs to classroom globes, we are accustomed to seeing the Earth as if from above, and climate catastrophe is no exception. However, this panoptic gaze has paradoxically narrowed our field of vision, flattening essential differences and reproducing many of the imaginative constraints of imperialism. By connecting recent media scholarship to decolonial thought, I show that alternative angles on the Anthropocene from the Global South can open up new ways of seeing what a world is, and can be, transforming the grounds of sensibility itself. This is a process in which art broadly – and the medium of photography specifically – proves critically important.
