The beauty of terror: Olaf Otto Becker photographs global warming

In the city of Tiksi in northern Siberia, Yakut children play like in a ghost town. Photographer Olaf Otto Becker dedicated a series to her in his illustrated book “Siberian Summer”. Deserted streets, factory ruins, rusty barges. After the end of the Soviet Union, mines and industry collapsed. But now the badly battered spot on the outermost edge of the Russian Empire has hope again, as the photographer describes. “Tiksi hopes for climate change,” he says. More precisely to its resurrection as a prosperous port city. In the near future, when the Northeast Passage between the Atlantic and the Pacific, which has been thawed as a result of global warming, will enable year-round shipping in the Arctic Ocean.

The views from Tiksi are a document of decay, in which the children’s faces remind us that people who are looking for a future live here too. The future that the resource-hungry human species has been increasingly endangering since industrialization. This is exactly what the photo exhibition “Signs of Change: Landscapes in Climate Change” in the German Museum of Technology tells about.

Olaf Otto Becker, who has been photographing landscapes for more than 30 years, talks about this conflict between man and nature, which is intensifying with the increasing world population, via video link at the press conference. In a way, his absence due to Covid disease is part of it: the less wilderness, the more zoonoses. He not only captured the development in his photographs of the polar regions, to which the right-hand side of the exhibition is dedicated.

On the left, primed in green, are the less poetic episodes. A flaming diptych shows forest fires in Australia. In addition, a cleared primeval forest in Indonesia documents the land hunger of the palm oil industry. However, the large formats that Olaf Otto Becker took in Singapore are more revealing than these motifs, which are also known from the news.

Nature as a feel-good backdrop in cities

On an artificial island in front of the city, created with masses of sand from Indonesia, structures made of plants and steel simulate trees. Bringing nature into the city is a big issue in Singapore, which is greening buildings on a large scale, says Becker. “Only the plants have to be constantly replaced because they don’t thrive in the climate.” There are natural limits to simulating nature as a feel-good setting.

Becker discovered climate change as a topic after photographing the same glacier in Iceland in 1999 and 2002 and noting significant changes. He traveled the west coast of Greenland in a rubber dinghy with his plate camera and hiked the 570 kilometers of the melting mainland ice sheet. And in doing so, he collected motifs of terrible beauty: glacial rivers whose turquoise water meanders kilometer after kilometer through the cracked ice sheet. Icebergs glowing pink in the sun and reflected in the polar sea. The Ilulissat glacier, nestled in a brown wasteland, spewing out crystalline ice masses, whose flow rate has accelerated from 25 to 50 meters per day in 20 years.

Given the dimming of the white splendour, it is impossible to surrender to the magic of this abstract world, the poetry of which, according to the reading of these pictures, is now on the wane. When the ice melts, solid particles are left that are transported through the air: coal dust, sand, plant parts. They absorb sunlight, which in turn leads to a stronger melt. A vicious circle that draws attractive contrasts on the ice as an aesthetic phenomenon.

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