Continuing through August 3, 2025

The Anthropocene, literally the Human Era, is a scientific label for the current period, one in which human impact on the earth due to industrialization, population growth, and consumerism has become undeniable to almost everyone — everyone not in power, that is. The term, first proposed in the 1960s by geologists, assumes that the Great Acceleration, the massive international economic development following World War II, was so life-changing that the preceding period, the Holocene, i.e., the present or recent era, dating from the origins of civilization some six thousand years ago, had to be designated as obsolete. The term “Anthropocene” is now used in common parlance, at least among the reality-based community. Particularly prominent in artistic discourse, The Anthropocene Project — including photos, exhibitions, a book and a movie — by Canadian photographer Edward Burtynsky in partnership with Nicholas de Pencier and Jennifer Baichwal, is represented here by a large 2017 color photo of lithium mines in Chile’s Atacama Desert.

The 67 photographs in this show, all taken since the turn of the millennium by 44 artists from around the world, reflect the vast changes that have taken place during the past twenty-five years. If nothing else, “Second Nature” documents how the digital revolution has altered ways in which we think and see. While conceptualist hybrid artistic practices that draw on multiple disciplines and processes evince the wide consensus of contemporary artists working in this genre of political art, the older analog modes of film photography and collage/montage are also well represented. Such now archaic pictorial works can be more polemically effective because of their very familiarity: there’s little or no need to read the text to get the subtext. 

“Second Nature” is a fitting title for the show. Culture used to be subsumed into nature. Now, the opposite seems to hold, for better or worse.

The show is divided into four general themes. “Reconfiguring Nature” depicts the natural world altered by capitalist industrialization. “Toxic Sublime” illustrates the visual beauty of these new spectacularized but poisoned landscapes. “Inhumane Geographies” further prosecutes the case against the monetization of earthly life. And “Envisioning Tomorrow” posts a happier, more enlightened — and more sustainable — existence for earthly life once we learn to live with nature instead of planning escapes to billionaire-only bunkers in Montana and Maui, and soon enough on Mars. 

The diversity of the imagery naturally refuses to be neatly categorized or corralled. Each work may differ from its neighbors in tone and message. In their introductory essay to the catalogue, the curators state that “there is no singular artistic understanding or record of the Anthropocene; the diversity of artistic perspectives [reflects] the diversity of perspectives in the scientific community.” 

While postmodernist theory dictates that life in its totality eludes capture by artists, at its best art does have the power to condense complex issues into memorable visual form. A good example was the work of the late Brazilian photographer and activist Sebastião Salgado, who set an aesthetic and moral precedent for many ecologically conscious progressives and true steward conservatives.

The most compelling pieces make their points about the dark side of capitalism with clarity and feeling, and at times with wit and irony. A few of the analogue standouts include Burtynsky’s joyously colorful Andes mining landscape, noted above. Gideon Mendel’s two “Drowning World: Submerged Portraits” (2011 and 2014) of Thai and UK flood victims managed to pose the subjects formally while standing in waist-deep water. 

Camille Seaman’s striking 2016 photograph “Iceberg in Blood Red Sea, Lemaire Channel, Antarctica” centers on a bluish-white iceberg caught between a blood-red sea and a persimmon- or tomato-red cloud-filled sky — all natural, without digital trickery. Sze Tsung Nicolás Leong’s 2004 urban landscape of Xuanwu District, in Nanjing, China is a study in contrasts between  progress and creative destruction. In this image new high-rise buildings flank and frame the crumbling ruins of the old residential hutong district, which resembles an archaeological dig more than an urban neighborhood. In Zhang Kechun’s “Between the Mountains and Water No. 51” (2014) the eye goes to the urban skyline rising like a bar graph from the horizon. Popping out against a misty Manhattan, in the bottom foreground a group of swimmers stands atop a small rocky island in the river, reflected in the water, their bodies echoing the buildings’ mountainous verticals. The swimmers absorb the majority of our attention.

Building on these examples with elements of montage and collage are works that break from traditional photography’s search for the decisive moment in order to expand the temporal dimension to include past and future. Hayley Millar Baker’s two 2017 photo collages from her “Before, Now, Tomorrow” series of landscapes combine bilateral symmetry in black and white photographs taken by her grandfather. An indigenous Australian, he considered that the land retains the memories of what has transpired, “even if the race is fated to disappear.” Noémie Goudal also disrupts convention in her 2016 forestscape, in which a wall of color photos have each been placed in exact correspondence to the foliage blocked from view. Not only do the images evoke a sense of deep time, they interrogate the line between deception and representation.

Yang Yonglian’s 2014 digital collage, “Travelers Among Mountains and Streams,” according to Marshall N. Price’s essay, “The End of the World (As We Know It),” conflates, with its towering mountains and Lilliputian-scale architecture, two classic Chinese landscape paintings. But if you look closely, you see that the mountains are composed of skyscrapers, seemingly compressed and petrified into hexagonal basalt columns. The trees at the base and summit of the mountains are oil-well drilling scaffolds — a nod across the centuries as well as to Pieter Breughel.

A number of other works incorporate unusual media, or are the result of conceptual investigations, or attempt to correct the injustices of history and race. They will no doubt find their viewers as well. The Anthropocene, like democracy, is inarguably endangered, and deserves no less than this polyphonic chorus of voices to sustain its validity.