You have to admire someone for even trying to turn a UNDP report on climate change into a sexy piece of multimedia, even Orson Welles would have failed.   Its an impossible task.
Magnum in Motion’s One Planet, One Chance would have perhaps been better titled One Planet, No Chance.¬†¬† Personally I had no chance of following the graphs that kept popping up in an attempt to persuade me that their apocalyptic vision of the world is based on hard UNDP commissioned science. I find it difficult to believe that they tested this production with an audience.
I can’t help but feeling that certain sections of the photographic world, in their unquenchable pursuit of World Press award winning misery have blown it.
Think about it .. its not even shocking anymore that the shocking no longer shocks. That’s how far we’ve gone.
One of the last jobs I did for the BBC was to produce the documentary strand Costing The Earth so I know just how difficult the environment is to cover. In much the same way that images of war are becoming increasingly redundant, increasingly barren in their ability to shock, so too the audience are becoming immune to climate change hyperbole.¬† If images of death and destruction happening right now don’t move us why should we give a damn about what will happen to poor people in the future? Lets face it nobody really cares about what is going on in Haiti right now, or Ethiopia, they barely make the headlines, but when a storm heads towards New Orleans rolling news starts to orgasm.
Harsh, but true.
(Do check out Magnum in Motion. Their work is ambitious, often brilliantly produced and always challenging.)
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