LOOK Photo Biennial:
Beyond Sight

In 2024′s LOOK Photo Biennial, three projects strive to bring the climate crisis into greater focus. Mike Pinnington considers the issues at hand, and the success (or otherwise) of the works on display…

Earlier this year, under the banner of LOOK Climate Lab, Open Eye Gallery invited researchers, artists, academics and ‘visionaries’ to think of the gallery as a space in which to discuss and experiment with ideas around how photography might engage with and address climate emergency. The result is 2024′s LOOK Photo Biennial, subtitled Beyond Sight; from the night sky to the fallout of war and the medium of photography itself, it sees three projects tackling the various issues brought together.

Each is given room to breathe across Open Eye’s distinct spaces. On arrival, you’ll encounter wolves on the prowl and observatories scanning the heavens. This is Mattia Balsamini’s Protege Noctem; eerie, profound and compelling, it is concerned with, as the artist says, ‘the disappearance of the night’. More prosaically, in its documenting of the harmful effects of artificial light on the night sky, Protege Noctem is about light pollution – a risk factor, say epidemiologists, equal to pollution, alcohol and smoking.

It interrogates and presents its impacts on ecosystems by juxtaposing poetry, beauty and mystery – all of which belong to the night – with stark warnings that must not be ignored. Via the wall text, Balsamini speaks of the natural night sky as a ‘soiled canvas’. This assertion is perhaps no better illustrated than by an image tracing the movements of the International Space Station; it bears an uncanny resemblance to his fellow Italian Lucio Fontana’s 1960 work, Spatial Concept ‘Waiting’, one of a series whose main feature is a slashed canvas.

In the next room, we crash back to earth with Stephanie Wynne’s Erosion, a photographic research project investigating the disposal of rubble along Merseyside’s coastline – a by-product of Second World War bombings. Writing about the project previously, I’ve likened witnessing these images as akin to travelling back in time. But, of course, they also put us in mind of current events, those without the benefit of intervening decades, whether that be in Gaza, Ukraine or elsewhere. It makes the question posed by the gallery, of ‘when or if a conflict is over, how does the structure of a city or landscape recover?’ (and by extension, its people, those who are left behind anyway), all the more pressing. Wynne’s pictures hold us to account, making man’s violence against man and the environment self-evident.

Somewhat less obviously immediate, Precious Metals finds Melanie King exploring the environmentally harmful processes – through the mining and life-cycle of key ingredients silver and palladium – of the medium itself. These works take on a somewhat cosmic quality, capturing nebulae and ‘ancient light’, to artfully demonstrate how materials so inextricably linked to the history of photography can be thought of and used in alternative ways so as not to find their way into and damage the environment. So, for example, King’s daguerreotypes of supernovae highlight the origins of both silver and palladium, while she has worked with scientists to reclaim silver from photographic fixative, using it instead to plate jewellery.

Balsamini, Wynne and King’s projects have much to recommend them; on a practical level, they’re unquestionably valuable in striving to bring into greater focus a plethora of depressingly urgent environmental concerns. That they simultaneously work on the level of being interesting, frequently beautiful, images is also true.

My only concern is that, in the case of the former, I’m not certain the latter helps. If there’s something we know for sure about human beings, it’s that we like – and like to be distracted by – shiny, pretty things. That is hardly the fault of the artists included in this show, however (or, indeed, its programmers); it’s up to the rest of us, not least decision-makers, to take heed and act accordingly.

Mike Pinnington

LOOK Photo Biennial: Beyond Sight closes Sunday, 1 September

Images, from top: © Mattia Balsamini; Install, LOOK 2024, Open Eye Gallery © Rob Battersby