WEBVTT 00:00:00.561 --> 00:00:02.978 (calm music) 00:00:08.790 --> 00:00:10.950 - Climate change exists outside of human perception. 00:00:10.950 --> 00:00:12.093 It's bigger than us. 00:00:14.100 --> 00:00:15.960 We can see local expressions of it, 00:00:15.960 --> 00:00:18.030 but we can't see the climate changing 00:00:18.030 --> 00:00:19.980 and that's really the inherent problem. 00:00:21.540 --> 00:00:24.337 It's on a scale beyond what we can perceive. 00:00:28.148 --> 00:00:30.050 The rain forest itself spans nine countries. 00:00:30.050 --> 00:00:31.200 So as a subject alone, 00:00:31.200 --> 00:00:32.943 it's hard to imagine as an object. 00:00:33.917 --> 00:00:36.500 (tree falling) 00:00:40.320 --> 00:00:42.660 We're really on the tipping point now. 00:00:42.660 --> 00:00:45.840 New research suggests that actually the rainforest 00:00:45.840 --> 00:00:48.030 is no longer absorbing carbon. 00:00:48.030 --> 00:00:49.080 There's so much burning happening, 00:00:49.080 --> 00:00:51.753 it's now a net producer of carbon. 00:00:54.870 --> 00:00:56.820 But how to tell the story adequately, 00:00:56.820 --> 00:00:59.580 I mean we've seen one picture of a burning rainforest, 00:00:59.580 --> 00:01:00.780 we've seen them all in a way. 00:01:00.780 --> 00:01:02.250 And those pictures are very important, 00:01:02.250 --> 00:01:03.083 but you know, 00:01:03.083 --> 00:01:05.628 there's so much more to unpack in the Brazilian Amazon. 00:01:06.803 --> 00:01:08.400 I'm very interested in trying to find a way to 00:01:08.400 --> 00:01:11.940 express extremely, deeply complex things 00:01:11.940 --> 00:01:14.230 by looking very carefully at these loaded landscapes, 00:01:14.230 --> 00:01:18.303 bigger subjects that the camera can't necessarily see. 00:01:26.760 --> 00:01:29.460 My first big project is my first real project, 00:01:29.460 --> 00:01:31.410 but I chose the missing persons crisis 00:01:31.410 --> 00:01:34.170 in postwar Balkan nations. 00:01:34.170 --> 00:01:35.580 A lot of people had not come home 00:01:35.580 --> 00:01:37.410 from war and had disappeared. 00:01:37.410 --> 00:01:40.050 They were assumed to have been buried in mass graves 00:01:40.050 --> 00:01:41.250 which had never been identified. 00:01:41.250 --> 00:01:43.740 So the beautiful landscape of Bosnia 00:01:43.740 --> 00:01:46.680 and across the Balkans was underwritten by this tragedy. 00:01:46.680 --> 00:01:50.115 And so there was an inherent tension within the land itself, 00:01:50.115 --> 00:01:53.610 but also an inherent abstraction within the subject matter. 00:01:53.610 --> 00:01:55.200 And I was going around trying to photograph something 00:01:55.200 --> 00:01:57.030 that you can't put in front of the lens. 00:01:57.030 --> 00:01:59.110 And I couldn't see. 00:02:00.870 --> 00:02:03.330 The lack of closure of an entire society 00:02:03.330 --> 00:02:05.640 to move on from war because of an inability 00:02:05.640 --> 00:02:07.023 to mourn the dead. 00:02:09.300 --> 00:02:11.670 And I started just looking at the landscape 00:02:11.670 --> 00:02:12.933 and documenting 00:02:14.190 --> 00:02:19.190 I suppose the absence within the lived environment, 00:02:19.710 --> 00:02:20.970 the inscription on the land, 00:02:20.970 --> 00:02:22.083 at least emotionally. 00:02:23.040 --> 00:02:24.780 But for me it was foundational. 00:02:24.780 --> 00:02:26.730 In a way it's something that I keep coming back 00:02:26.730 --> 00:02:28.413 to in maybe all my projects. 00:02:36.090 --> 00:02:38.550 Kodak had announced the discontinuation 00:02:38.550 --> 00:02:41.285 of a specific infrared film called Aerohrome 00:02:41.285 --> 00:02:43.943 that was invented in World War II in collaboration 00:02:43.943 --> 00:02:46.283 with the US military for camouflage detection. 00:02:48.750 --> 00:02:51.660 So infrared light bounces off the chlorophyll 00:02:51.660 --> 00:02:52.890 in healthy plants. 00:02:52.890 --> 00:02:55.230 Camouflage tends to be made of material, 00:02:55.230 --> 00:02:56.400 fabric or paint 00:02:56.400 --> 00:02:58.680 and all of those don't have chlorophyll. 00:02:58.680 --> 00:03:01.020 If you could image register infrared light 00:03:01.020 --> 00:03:03.180 you could instantly pick out the enemy targets 00:03:03.180 --> 00:03:05.280 essentially seeing through the camouflage. 00:03:12.840 --> 00:03:14.790 In Congo, back then there was at least 50 00:03:14.790 --> 00:03:15.630 different arm groups. 00:03:15.630 --> 00:03:17.280 I think now there's more than 80 00:03:17.280 --> 00:03:18.570 fighting against each other. 00:03:18.570 --> 00:03:20.800 So it's a very opaque conflict 00:03:23.430 --> 00:03:26.373 and that as a result means it's very overlooked. 00:03:27.840 --> 00:03:29.640 I was taking a medium that literally 00:03:29.640 --> 00:03:31.830 can make visible what we can't see 00:03:31.830 --> 00:03:35.043 and I was smashing it into an unseeness. 00:03:37.080 --> 00:03:38.970 That metaphoric leap was very important 00:03:38.970 --> 00:03:41.040 and it turned out the more I pushed it 00:03:41.040 --> 00:03:42.780 it began to really bare fruit. 00:03:42.780 --> 00:03:45.510 It started to be raising awareness 00:03:45.510 --> 00:03:48.060 of some of these narratives that I was documenting 00:03:48.060 --> 00:03:50.853 and that was remarkable. 00:03:53.190 --> 00:03:55.380 But that was the sort of beginning of a new phase 00:03:55.380 --> 00:03:57.480 in my practice which I think is kind of continuing 00:03:57.480 --> 00:04:00.330 until today of using surveillance technologies 00:04:00.330 --> 00:04:03.300 to try to push the limits of the camera, 00:04:03.300 --> 00:04:05.553 of the documentary image specifically. 00:04:09.120 --> 00:04:10.530 Finishing my project in Congo 00:04:10.530 --> 00:04:12.900 I found out about a specific surveillance camera 00:04:12.900 --> 00:04:15.900 that can see and perceive heat. 00:04:15.900 --> 00:04:18.600 It's proven to image the human body heat 00:04:18.600 --> 00:04:20.430 from 30 kilometers distance, 00:04:20.430 --> 00:04:21.843 which is a good 19 miles. 00:04:22.830 --> 00:04:26.283 The image that it produced was very uncanny and haunting. 00:04:28.230 --> 00:04:30.180 The heat within our blood and our veins 00:04:30.180 --> 00:04:33.123 is instantly depicted in ways that we can't see 00:04:33.123 --> 00:04:34.410 with the human eye, 00:04:34.410 --> 00:04:36.183 our breath, our sweat. 00:04:37.454 --> 00:04:38.640 (beeping sound) 00:04:38.640 --> 00:04:39.663 - Wait, wait, wait, wait. 00:04:39.663 --> 00:04:40.496 Just a moment. 00:04:40.496 --> 00:04:41.663 Just a moment. 00:04:47.910 --> 00:04:49.050 - And at that time, 00:04:49.050 --> 00:04:53.619 there was this exponential wave of illegal immigration 00:04:53.619 --> 00:04:55.110 into the European Union. 00:04:55.110 --> 00:05:00.110 Refugees come to claim their human rights of asylum. 00:05:04.080 --> 00:05:06.720 This camera itself can be seen as a weapons technology 00:05:06.720 --> 00:05:08.580 to detect and to turn them back. 00:05:08.580 --> 00:05:11.610 So it was the perfect prism to mediate all 00:05:11.610 --> 00:05:15.030 of the complex narratives that I began to document 00:05:15.030 --> 00:05:16.580 over a course of several years. 00:05:20.640 --> 00:05:21.990 There were a lot of people 00:05:21.990 --> 00:05:24.540 and there still are a lot of people, 00:05:24.540 --> 00:05:27.660 dying, drowning of exposure to the weather. 00:05:27.660 --> 00:05:30.000 And this camera is designed to indexically 00:05:30.000 --> 00:05:32.250 reveal human mortality expressed 00:05:32.250 --> 00:05:34.053 through cellular combustion. 00:05:35.610 --> 00:05:38.130 This is a remarkable instance 00:05:38.130 --> 00:05:40.530 of the camera showing us something we can't even see. 00:05:40.530 --> 00:05:43.380 Red Cross volunteers rubbing the life giving heat 00:05:43.380 --> 00:05:45.810 onto the blankets that have been swaddled 00:05:45.810 --> 00:05:48.420 around this dying person. 00:05:48.420 --> 00:05:50.580 And you could see the thermal hand print, 00:05:50.580 --> 00:05:52.833 the life giving warmth being transferred. 00:05:53.820 --> 00:05:55.320 I'm there primarily as a human 00:05:55.320 --> 00:05:57.384 and there are instances where we put our things 00:05:57.384 --> 00:06:00.420 things down and help when there's no one else. 00:06:00.420 --> 00:06:02.073 That's just what humans do. 00:06:03.150 --> 00:06:05.190 But in the instances when we continue to film, 00:06:05.190 --> 00:06:08.949 when there are other volunteers for example, working, 00:06:08.949 --> 00:06:12.873 there's a real sense of belief in what we do, 00:06:14.100 --> 00:06:19.100 a sense of faith in the importance of the documentary image 00:06:19.800 --> 00:06:21.630 of the evidential image. 00:06:21.630 --> 00:06:24.690 Otherwise you wouldn't go to those lengths to carry 00:06:24.690 --> 00:06:27.693 those that kind of recording out. 00:06:31.140 --> 00:06:34.230 So I made a series of panoramic large scale images, 00:06:34.230 --> 00:06:36.810 heat maps of refugee camps. 00:06:36.810 --> 00:06:39.270 And I also made a three screen immersive video 00:06:39.270 --> 00:06:43.320 called Incoming with sound by Ben Frost 00:06:43.320 --> 00:06:45.540 and cinematography by Trevor Tweeten. 00:06:45.540 --> 00:06:48.007 So these are the good friends of mine 00:06:48.007 --> 00:06:50.490 who I collaborated with also in the Enclave in Congo 00:06:50.490 --> 00:06:53.853 and whom I worked with again on my new film, Broken Spectre. 00:06:59.409 --> 00:07:02.076 Can we try ultra on this screen? 00:07:15.174 --> 00:07:16.230 Photography is at the very heart 00:07:16.230 --> 00:07:20.160 of understanding the velocity of deforestation 00:07:20.160 --> 00:07:21.750 and I began researching the cameras 00:07:21.750 --> 00:07:23.950 in the satellites that produce all the data. 00:07:31.260 --> 00:07:33.540 But what really made me more curious was the fact 00:07:33.540 --> 00:07:36.510 that the same cameras are being used by agribusiness 00:07:36.510 --> 00:07:40.053 and mining to maximize the exploitation of the land. 00:07:45.000 --> 00:07:46.980 But I also wanted to change gears 00:07:46.980 --> 00:07:49.110 because a lot of the stuff we see in the Amazon 00:07:49.110 --> 00:07:52.620 is taken from over, from a high altitude. 00:07:52.620 --> 00:07:55.070 What about the stuff we don't see, the non-human? 00:08:03.420 --> 00:08:07.110 If you take one square inch of life in the rainforest, 00:08:07.110 --> 00:08:09.510 it's just, it's tripping with life. 00:08:09.510 --> 00:08:11.823 Just the amount of species is extraordinary. 00:08:13.350 --> 00:08:15.687 Scientists use ultraviolet lights to try 00:08:15.687 --> 00:08:17.490 and show things about plants. 00:08:17.490 --> 00:08:18.960 So I borrow that language 00:08:18.960 --> 00:08:20.700 and created these very strange, 00:08:20.700 --> 00:08:23.493 almost gothic nocturns. 00:08:29.070 --> 00:08:31.890 - Yeah, we can put the big flat bar here. 00:08:31.890 --> 00:08:32.723 Let's keep that. 00:08:33.780 --> 00:08:35.280 - You can see actually little animals 00:08:35.280 --> 00:08:37.170 in there moving around. 00:08:37.170 --> 00:08:38.460 We had a lot of technical issues. 00:08:38.460 --> 00:08:40.440 - Yeah, we'd spend hours and hours 00:08:40.440 --> 00:08:42.810 and then all of a sudden the light would turn off 00:08:42.810 --> 00:08:44.220 and then or the camera would shut down. 00:08:44.220 --> 00:08:46.720 Actually half the time the camera was overheating. 00:08:52.200 --> 00:08:54.720 - The third scale that I chose to examine 00:08:54.720 --> 00:08:56.013 was the human scale. 00:09:03.780 --> 00:09:05.790 We hold a lot of responsibility 00:09:05.790 --> 00:09:08.760 for the processes that unfold in the Amazon. 00:09:08.760 --> 00:09:11.130 A lot of the cheap beef directly coming straight 00:09:11.130 --> 00:09:14.730 from encroached primary forest and also just our banks. 00:09:14.730 --> 00:09:16.230 A lot of that money's predicated 00:09:16.230 --> 00:09:18.423 on agribusiness interests in Brazil. 00:09:19.290 --> 00:09:21.600 So it's everywhere. 00:09:21.600 --> 00:09:24.630 It surrounds us, but how do we implicate the viewer? 00:09:24.630 --> 00:09:27.352 This is the real problem and one that we wanted to do. 00:09:27.352 --> 00:09:30.363 And our answer was to make a western. 00:09:40.770 --> 00:09:42.780 And that's weirdly incongruous 00:09:42.780 --> 00:09:44.670 you would think with the rainforest, 00:09:44.670 --> 00:09:46.950 but actually everywhere we went in the rainforest 00:09:46.950 --> 00:09:50.100 a lot of the processes we were witnessing of deforestation 00:09:50.100 --> 00:09:51.813 were being carried out by cowboys. 00:09:57.330 --> 00:10:00.840 Cowboy culture actually began centuries ago in Spain 00:10:00.840 --> 00:10:02.850 and then it was exported to North America 00:10:02.850 --> 00:10:04.770 where it became its own distinct thing. 00:10:04.770 --> 00:10:07.680 And when it made its way to Northern Brazil in the Amazon 00:10:07.680 --> 00:10:11.730 it became sort of bastardized by the cultural aspirations 00:10:11.730 --> 00:10:16.730 of the United States, of manifest destiny 00:10:16.890 --> 00:10:19.260 which had already devastated the environment 00:10:19.260 --> 00:10:21.780 and the Indigenous communities in the United States, 00:10:21.780 --> 00:10:24.780 but is now doing the same in the Amazon, 00:10:24.780 --> 00:10:26.673 and it's almost identical in spirit. 00:10:30.240 --> 00:10:32.040 The texture of the Spaghetti Western 00:10:32.040 --> 00:10:33.960 immediately resonates with the viewer, 00:10:33.960 --> 00:10:35.510 with the Western viewer anyway. 00:10:38.250 --> 00:10:40.770 And I think that hopefully that will be overly 00:10:40.770 --> 00:10:41.940 familiar to us. 00:10:41.940 --> 00:10:42.940 This is our culture. 00:10:57.870 --> 00:10:59.460 We don't set out, 00:10:59.460 --> 00:11:01.320 open the door one morning with a fixed idea 00:11:01.320 --> 00:11:02.770 that we have to go and prove. 00:11:03.750 --> 00:11:07.470 We try to absorb the narrative in the field in real life 00:11:07.470 --> 00:11:09.180 and that's a conversation with the subject 00:11:09.180 --> 00:11:11.480 and with the people whom we meet along the way. 00:11:16.590 --> 00:11:18.330 - There's nothing that is like actually being 00:11:18.330 --> 00:11:19.980 in the field and you just learn so much just 00:11:19.980 --> 00:11:22.110 from conversations with people on the ground. 00:11:22.110 --> 00:11:23.163 It's just amazing. 00:11:28.058 --> 00:11:31.170 - My power, if I have any, is to be able to show you this 00:11:31.170 --> 00:11:35.210 what I've seen in a more powerful way than, 00:11:35.210 --> 00:11:37.800 I dunno than perhaps the pictures that you've seen 00:11:37.800 --> 00:11:39.570 in the newspaper of the same thing. 00:11:39.570 --> 00:11:44.570 Or in a new and different way and to make you remember that.