Janne Seppänen

Visualizing Biodiversity: The Role of Photographs in Environmental Discourse

Photographs have had an important role to play in the ‘environmental awakening’ since the 1960s. If people had not been alerted to the environmental crisis earlier, they certainly were shaken by the images they were shown in their living rooms of oiled seabirds, poisoned fish and forests destroyed by acid rain. At the same time wonders-ofnature documentaries and colourful nature books have continued to offer images of untouched, not-yet destroyed nature. In juxtaposing ‘virgin’ nature with the nature man has shaped and contaminated, one aim is to get people to take action for conservation. This is most typical of photographs published in newspapers and magazines, television news footage as well as nature documentaries. Images serve to arouse emotions, to stimulate action or to open up windows on the nature that still seems to exist somewhere out there. Indeed photographs are often used to provide proof of dramatic environmental changes. Other types of scientific illustrations are also used for the same end of providing incontrovertible evidence: these may include maps describing the thinning of the ozone layer or graphs illustrating the advance of climate change. In this article we discuss the role of the photograph in environmental communication. More concretely, we are concerned with the definition, popularization and visualization of biodiversity in newspaper articles. We argue that photographs are crucial elements in the production of meanings. Like linguistic metaphors they are selective means of popularization with their ability to highlight certain aspects of reality while hiding others. Besides that photographs are used to construct social relations between different actors and to evoke emotions that do not translate easily into linguistic form. This makes photographs and other visual images important elements in the

IMAGINARY DARKROOM: Digital photo editing as a strategic ritual

Although the darkroom as a physical space has disappeared from newsrooms, it continues its life in an imaginary form, which sets the limits for digital photo editing. This article sheds light on this imaginary darkroom and its Tuchmanian rituals of objectivity by presenting results of a survey that was conducted in Finland among editorial staffs from different types of newspapers. By showing example sets of unaltered and altered photographic images, the survey mapped answers to such questions as: what are the limits of legitimacy for photo editing, what kinds of alterations in images should be announced to readers, and what effects may digital editing have on the alleged status of the “objective image”? The results show that all categories of staff generally oppose altering photographs used in a news context. The so-called objectivity of the journalistic image is an ideal that is deeply intertwined with journalistic work routines, but in concrete editing examples, opinions about what is acceptable and what is not may differ considerably. However, very often professionals refer to the “darkroom principle”: what was allowed in traditional darkrooms is also allowed in digital editing.

Aporetic Apparatus: Epistemological Transformations of the Camera

Abstract In this article, we examine the epistemology of the camera today. In order to answer this question, we concentrate on three social and technological forms: the camera obscura, the photographic camera, and the digital camera. On the one hand, the camera extends our human sensibilities and helps us to obtain knowledge of the world. On the other hand, it works as a device for delusion, bodily vision and spectacle. Historically, these two functions are meshed together in complicated ways and this establishes the paradoxical epistemology of the camera. We argue that, even if contemporary debates about the truthfulness of the photographic image have persistently been tied to the digitisation of the photographic process, the very origin of these debates actually lies in the camera itself and its contradictory epistemology. The camera has worked, and still works, as an apparatus that relentlessly produces irresolvable ambiguity, aporia, between true knowledge and illusory vision.