Danièle Méaux, whose name is familiar to readers of Leonardo Reviews, is a leading French photography scholar, with an impressive list of works mainly on photography and space (she also edits the trendsetting open access journal Focales [1]). Her new book on the relationships between photography as a politically driven cultural practice and the Anthropocene as our new human and material environment is the logical continuation of her concern with space and place. In this work, the notion of place is opened to a broader environmental context, while the already strong focus on the political commitment of the photographer’s creation more directly addresses the no-less-political position of the spectator or reader in this new strand of photography.
Photographie contemporaine et anthropocène is not limited to a highly readable overview of the most important tendencies and highlights of environmental productions within contemporary photography (“contemporary” in the French context...