Carrie and Eric Tomberlin (US)
Sea Level Rise: Visualizing Climate Change It is difficult to trust what one cannot see. Scientists implore us to act now to stop climate change from destroying the planet, but data is invisible and change is slow and does not impact everyone equally. Having photographed environmental issues for many years, Carrie and Eric find the images of climate change to be limited due to the gradual and elusive nature of the problem. For several years they have been working on a new kind of photography the artists call time distillation. This new paradigm allows them to collect a range of time and collapse it into panoramic space which they later distill into a singular allegorical narrative that has the potential to express a more complex story than a singular photographic
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image. This process parallels environmental issues in that it is the accumulation of time that reveals the gravity of the situation more clearly than any individual moment. To best visualize this issue, Carrie and Eric travelled to Bangladesh, which is considered by the international scientific community to be amongst the world’s most vulnerable populations to the effects of climate change. Though Bangladesh faces seemingly insurmountable challenges, they are not merely coping, but adapting with resilience and ingenuity utilizing community-based adaptations. In doing so, they provide an example of taking action on a local, national, and international level to mitigate and adapt to the effects of climate
