From the Colonial Period until now, sentiment toward the environment in the American continent has been problematized and aestheticized through visual representations conceived in various formats. We propose a volume of specialized essays with images carefully selected as active agents in order for experts to develop alternative reflections about crises of mining, energy, forests, agriculture, biodiversity, water, and climate change in Latin American contexts. For example, in the 19th century, paintings, lithographs, and photographs revealed perceptions, fears, fascinations, and other opinions in regard to the processes of modernization.   At the same time, they participated and influenced the symbolic confirmation of these perceptions.  We will take into account the periods assigned throughout the project of the handbook  (Colonial, 19th c., 1950 and beyond).

For the early Colonial Period, it will be important to recognize the appearance of images produced under European influences, for example codices, maps, and paintings.  This section will deal with the analysis of the collision of cosmovisions and their effects on the images of the populations. If during the Colonial Period the natural disasters were seen, in great part, as divine punishment, then there would be painters who transferred these horrific perceptions to canvas that intended to depict the vulnerability of human beings confronted with drought, storms, earthquakes, landslides, and plagues that razed crops. Apart from visual devices, there will be essays about the way in which, during colonialism, local bureaucrats in many city halls across the continent, tried to alleviate the damage provoked by epidemics, floods, or earthquakes by resorting to religious methods such as processions or pleas to saints, underestimating the findings of people with scientific training. Images representative of the enormous dangers suffered by miners, construction workers, and plantation slaves and sugar refiners during the colonial years will also be integrated.  

For the 19th century, we propose essays developed from images that give account of the great ruin caused by the uncontrolled growth in cities, as well as the struggles over land disputes and the precariousness of the means of confronting urban disasters.  That said, even if, from the Colonial Period through the 19th century, attitudes imbued with resigned fatalism were prevalent, there were, still, enormous advances and very significant events throughout the continent that combated problems related to illnesses, natural disasters, mining and refinery accidents, floods, droughts, overuse of water, food, loss of harvests, etc.  Additionally, we are interested in exploring how, in the 19th century, artistic mediums like painting, lithography, and photography not only revealed collective perceptions and opinions regarding modernization, but also became participants, influenced, and formed a part of these perceptions.  We think of the almost magical character that was attributed to photography in its first years when, also, the idea it “took your soul” was popularized. Also, very important during the 19th century were the anthropological photographs, almost ghostly, of indigenous communities (Mapuches, Wichis, Selk´nam, Aché, etc.) ruined by the processes of modernization and colonialism on the continent.  We think of the colored post card that were made with those photos destined to be sold in the poorly named “human zoos” of Europe, too.   Photography and the railroad, for example, are technologies that go hand and hand and mutually compliment each other. In this same line of thought, we benefit from the wealth of images that, during the 19th century, demonstrate national advancements in disaster prevention, but also the disastrous effects of massive transnational companies founded at the end of the century, like United Fruit Company.   

About the period comprising the second half of the 20th century, we have been thinking about the paintings and photographs that reveal the complex affective relations that people maintain with natural environments.  We are interested in showing how, through images, one might reflect on climate catastrophes, like the melting glaciers in Patagonia, without concentrating the gaze exclusively in the disaster itself.  More so, we are interested in new hybrid forms of visual representation: land art, performance, film, digital creations, drone or satellite imagery that organize the global Anthropocene, as well, and can be artifices of knowledge and power. These photographs could permit the act of reflecting on the very condition of the image, “What does photography mean without photographers?”, for example. On the other hand, just as Jens Andermann in Tierras de trance makes clear, we will see how the great wealth of images permits us to approach ecological imbalances from different perspectives, that is to say, from the folds of space-time that are not defined by exteriority, but rather from the subjective, scenographic, and liminal experiences that people have maintained with the environment.