Framing

Those of you who have followed Frame to Grain for a while will know that I’ve increasingly focused my writing and photography on the infrastructure that we have constructed to supply our energy needs, and on our culture of consumption. This shift has been deliberate. The older I get the more I find myself asking questions about the impact that I as an individual, and we as a society, are having on the world that we live in.

When I am out making pictures for Frame to Grain I am conscious that each time I look through my camera lens to capture a picture I am looking at a single and unique moment in time. This moment will never occur again, nobody will ever find the scene I am framing in my viewfinder exactly the same way as I find it at that moment. The uniqueness of that moment brings a certain degree of power and responsibility to me as a photographer. I have the ability to shape the story the viewer experiences by what I decide to frame through my lens. But framing is always an act of exclusion as well as inclusion. What I decide to leave out of the frame is just as important to the story I create as what I decide to include.

As my interest in sustainability has grown I’ve begun to realise that the stories we are told about climate change work the same way. They are composed images, not neutral perspectives. Certain data is captured within the frame, certain data, where it doesn’t support the narrative sought, is cropped out.

I recently read the excellent book Not the End of the World by Hannah Ritchie. It’s a great read about the actual science and fact behind the stories we are told about environmental sustainability and climate change. Ritchie is the Deputy Editor at Our World in Data, a highly influential online platform that brings together data and research on the world’s biggest challenges and makes it accessible for a general audience.

Ritchie’s book brings a clarity and energy to the headlines we are often bombarded with about climate change and other sustainability matters. Her work helped me better understand what has been left out of the frame, what has been cropped. And it turns out that everything is not as bad or as clear cut as you might think.

For example, we are told that emissions that cause climate change are accelerating. However, here’s what has been cropped out of the frame: our emissions per capita reached a peak in 2012 and have been slowly falling ever since. On an individual basis we now emit much less carbon than our parents or grandparents did, despite the myth that they lived much less energy intensive and frugal lives. In fact, in the UK each of us now emits about as much as somebody in the 1850s yet the energy efficient technology we now have access to enables us to have an immeasurably better standard of life.

Of course that’s not all of the story. Even though the world has reached and passed peak birth rates (I was surprised to learn that we passed that point in 2017), the lag whilst those children grow up and live their lives means that the planet will not reach peak population size until the 2080s. That population growth means that even though emissions per capita are falling, gross worldwide emissions are still rising.

What about on a more micro scale? We are told that we should eat organic food locally grown, or at the very least grown in the UK. But again, the dominant narrative has cropped some inconvenient data out of the frame.

What the data actually tells us is that the transport element of our food chain only contributes about 5% of the total emissions caused by food production. And in fact most of that 5% comes from the emissions caused by lorry transport within a country ie. not the shipping itself (food that is sent by air has a different emissions profile). The rest of the emissions caused by food production come from land use change and emissions on the farm itself and, if you are trying to grow produce that is not native to the country in which you live – for example, trying to grow bananas in the UK, those emissions will be much higher.

What about the myth that we don’t produce enough food to feed everyone in the world? Again, cropped. We actually produce enough to feed everyone alive today twice the daily recommended intake of calories.

Ritchie is very keen to point out that this slightly more positive story is certainly not an excuse to stop doing the things we need to do to slow down climate change and environmental destruction. The consequences of not doing so will still be catastrophic. We feel and see this in our changing weather patterns, the plastic and litter washed up along the beaches that we stroll along, the latest headline we read about this or that species being in danger, the wild fire devastation we see in our news feeds.

Frame to Grain is my attempt to compose honestly, to tell a story about the places I visit as I find them, to share with you what confirms but also what confounds or complicates the narratives we are told about our impact on the world.

You will hopefully already have seen that what I see through my viewfinder sometimes triggers unexpected emotions in me – awe when I stood in the shadow of a nuclear reactor, or hope when I surveyed tens of thousands of shipping containers.

There are no easy answers to many of the existential questions that I’ve been asking myself about climate change, our impact on the environment, the sustainability of the lives we all live, the footprint we leave behind. But the more I see, and the more I read, I realise that everything is not always as you first think. The frame we see is not always the whole story.