Shapiro Center Webinar: Nineteenth-Century Nature and Contemporary Photography

The exhibition “Storm Cloud: Picturing the Origins of Our Climate Crisis” charts the emerging awareness of human impact on the environment over the course of the 19th century. The show traces varied reactions to industrialization across writing and the visual arts, as well as the emerging sciences of geology, meteorology, and ecology. The inclusion of five contemporary artists whose work references 19th-century themes and photographic techniques demonstrates an engagement with these legacies.

The Shapiro Center presents an event focused on some of the contemporary voices in “Storm Cloud” who bring forward questions of environmental history to the present. Karla Nielsen, The Huntington’s senior curator of literary collections and co-curator of the exhibition, will briefly introduce the historical materials to which these artists’ work is juxtaposed. Linde B. Lehtinen, The Huntington’s Philip D. Nathanson Senior Curator of Photography, will then lead a conversation with three of the artists, Binh Danh, Leah Sobsey, and Will Wilson.

The program will cover such topics as land extraction, human influence on plants, environmental injustice, immigration, photographic technologies, and reparative histories.