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Gallery Editor’s Note

Climate change poses representational challenges for environmental activists, artists, and writers. It is not a singular, spectacular catastrophe. Its causes and consequences defy conventional depictions of instantaneous danger. Like other systemic and gradually escalating problems, it calls on scholars and image-makers to grapple with multiple timescales and to experiment with different modes of representation. In this issue’s Gallery essay, Ellen Stroud looks at a selection of photographs by the contemporary artist Zoe Strauss. These images focus on some of the most dramatic disasters in recent US history—the Deepwater Horizon BP oil spill along with Hurricanes Katrina and Sandy. Despite the sudden violence of these events, Stroud finds in Strauss’s photographs a subtle narrative of slow-motion tragedy. For Stroud, these images provide a portal into broader questions about the relationship between art and history, time and space, the local and the global. Her essay cuts across disciplinary boundaries to offer a provocative meditation on the challenges of environmental storytelling in an era of global ecological change. Finis Dunaway