“People want to see that science produces beauty, not just knowledge” says Liane G. Benning, a biochemistry professor at the GFZ Helmholtz Centre for Geoscience in Potsdam, Germany, who is working at the frontline of climate observation. Acutely aware of the consequences of global warming, she is addressing both the urgent need to engage the public and the failure of the scientific community to reach beyond its bubble. “We scientists are [bad] at explaining what we do, because we are always going into the complications a bit too fast,” she says. “And that’s why I like working with people like Michael, because we must do anything we can do to make people think [about climate change], especially if it’s through art, because art speaks to people.”
Benning is one of the principal investigators on the project Deep Purple in Greenland, which is named after areas of the ice sheet that are becoming increasingly deep purple in colour during melt season—a consequence of algal blooms that are colonising expanding areas of ice exposed by global warming. Najjar was invited to join the team on an expedition last year to see for himself. He also travelled to Ilulissat, on Greenland’s west coast, 220 miles north of the Arctic Circle. “When you go to the Jakobshavn Glacier, you see these enormous icebergs—huge, like skyscrapers—calving into the Arctic Sea. You see the process. You see the result of these little cells on the ice sheet.”
However, the world has become inured to images of cascading icebergs, and the visual memes of environmental journalism, showing us polar bears cast adrift on floating ice. Najjar believes we need new images that trigger a profound response to begin an intellectual engagement with the viewer. “I’m trying to capture people’s attention and bring them to action,” he says. “That’s why collaboration with scientists is so important.”
He spent several days photographing the monumental ice formations of Disko Bay, navigating close to them in a small boat, mapping them in his own kind of way, then returning to his studio and working on the photographs and videos for months to make a reconstruction. “In contrast to having a journalist or a television crew with us,” Benning says, “what I like about Michael’s work is that he actually takes that we see and reconstructs it and makes images that are very evocative. He looks at the same things that we do, but makes it into a different story. And I absolutely love that.”
For more info please visit the web page Michael Najjar, or the artist website
