Q&A – Facing Climate Change

I recently attended the Human Nature group exhibition on view at the Houston Center for Photography. Several of the artists included in the show were present. I had the opportunity to meet the collaborative team of Benjamin Drummond and Sara Steele and learn more about their project Facing Climate Change. Included in the HCP exhibition is their work documenting the Sámi Reindeer Herdsmen in Norway and how climate change and other challenges are threatening the future of reindeer husbandry. I thought the work was amazing and not just because the images were strong but the amount of research, effort and personal expense that goes in to pursuing a project like this.

Benjamin and Sara were kind enough to answer a few questions for our blog. I hope this becomes a regular feature for our readers.

How did you both decide to collaborate together? Was this the first project you worked on as a team?
Sara and I have been collaborating since 2001 when we received a fellowship from our college to complete a three-month traverse of the Peruvian Andes. We combined her writing and my photography from our trip for "Bone Wood Alpaca," which we distributed as both an (analog) multimedia slide show and hand-bound book. After we graduated, we collaborated on a number of smaller projects. Our main focus was "The Dipper's Attitude," an ongoing collection of profiles and portraits that explores who northwest naturalists are, how they attend to the natural world and why that matters. Excerpts from these projects are available at my website.

In 2006 we quit our jobs with a local conservation nonprofit to begin Facing Climate Change and make the leap to working together full time. While developing "The Dipper's Attitude," we learned of a group of glacier monitors in Iceland. These volunteers have been measuring the advance and retreat of glaciers in their own backyards, in some cases for three generations. Like our Northwest naturalists, they had deep observational knowledge of local landscapes, but in this case with an urgent global context. This is how we began our global project to illustrate global change through local people.


How do you feel working as a team enhances the final piece/project?
We capture both still images and audio in the field and it's obviously a huge help to split these responsibilities up. Sara will often lead an interview to help a subject focus on her and forget about the camera. We've also been learning when to work solo, which with some subjects, has been more fruitful than the team approach.

In her role as a producer and storyteller, Sara dedicates herself to communicating or collecting the story while I'm often focused on the visuals and technical work. When we combine our efforts we've found that we often achieve a balance between these two that would have been difficult on our own.

Finally, the scope and scale of this project is just too big for one person. Between fundraising and donor relations, to story research, pitching, writing, editing and production, as well as putting together exhibits and presentations, there's plenty of work to go around!


How did you decide/choose to focus on a particular group of people like the Sámi reindeer herders in Norway?
Our stories are grounded firmly in consensus-based scientific literature. We're not interested in local anecdotal "evidence" of climate change, nor are we out to profile the scientists researching the topic. Instead, we'll start by reading reports, such as the Arctic Climate Impacts Assessment, IPCC documents, or regional reports such as the Washington Climate Impacts Assessment. Next we meet with experts to develop our understanding and brainstorm possible field locations. Our goal is to find local communities and individuals that are illustrative of the broader findings reported in the scientific literature.

For the Sámi, we had read that warmer temperatures were causing freeze-thaw events that form impenetrable crusts over winter pastures. After meeting with a number of researchers and herders we learned that was true, but there were also more immediate threats from development in the Arctic and regulation of herd diversity that were hindering the herders' ability to adapt to a changing climate. This is a great example of how climate change doesn't act alone. Around the world, warming is amplifying existing economic, environmental and cultural threats.


How much research and planning goes on before you even make the trip to start documenting these groups? Has there been a group who turned you away?
We'll spend up to six-months or even a year researching a topic, but usually never fully understand a situation until we've spent time on the ground. We've never been turned away, but it always takes time to develop trust and gain access. This applies to our work in the US just as much as it does abroad.


I know you are working on a series on the West. Where else do you hope to travel to?
Our concept for Facing Climate Change was to complete a global series of six regional collections starting with the Nordic countries. The American West was the second location on our list, and the further along we got, the more we recognized a need for climate change work that was not about exotic people from far away (and often cold) places. We've been struck by both the significance, complexity and urgency of the local stories we're working on, and plan to spend more time focused on the West than we originally envisioned. For the next few years we will continue to focus on issues of fire and water in the Western US, as well as a small collection of sub-stories centered on the Pacific Northwest. We hope to work abroad again when these are complete.


How do you find funding for your projects? What percentage is grants and what percentage comes from your own pockets?
Much of our time is devoted to fundraising. We self-funded the Nordic fieldwork, and have been raising our living, field and distribution expenses since then. Our project is fiscally sponsored by Blue Earth, http://www.blueearth.org, which provides the nonprofit status required by many foundations or to receive tax-deductible donations from individuals. We've found that about 70 percent of our funding comes from individuals versus foundations, and this is true for most of Blue Earth's projects. We also take on freelance work to fill in the gaps.


Are there other photographers or artists who are doing similarly minded projects who inspire you?
We've been inspired by many. Blue Earth photographer Subhankar Banerjee's work on the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge is a great inspiration to us. His beautiful landscape work has been instrumental in connecting Americans to a complex, distant and inaccessible landscape, and galvanizing resistance to oil development. It's a tremendous success story. We were also influenced by husband-wife, photographer-writer team Peter Menzel and Faith D'Alusio. Their book "Hungry Planet" takes the simple concept of what a family eats in a week and explores it globally, allowing for fascinating juxtapositions and insights. Peter and Faith's latest project, Nutrition 101, is also under Blue Earth.


What would an ideal installation look like? Audio, images and text? Scale of photographs?
An ideal exhibition would include field audio and text in addition to the photographs. Sara is also working on a collection of found objects that she'll frame and incorporate with her writing for "The Tinder People" series on wildfire.


Thank you to Benjamin and Sara for sharing a little more about their work and their process. The Human Nature show runs through May 10.