ECOTOPIA: The Second ICP Triennial of Photography and Video

When the International Center of Photography launched Strangers, its first Triennial, in 2003, its curators wrote that their goal was “to demonstrate photography’s incomparable richness as a visual medium—in the form of still photographs, video, sculptural objects, and installation pieces. The result is a dynamic coherence that results as much from a dialogue between individual works as from curatorial intention.”This second time out, in a period of rampant natural disasters and concerns about global environmental change, they have shifted their attention from strangers, from our relationships with one-another, to home, to our relationships with the earth. Ecotopia brings readers the natural world through the eyes and lenses of some of the most interesting and engaging photographers working today. These 30 international artists shatter stereotypes of landscape and nature imagery to examine new concepts of the natural sphere occasioned by twenty-first-century technologies. They capture our destructive engagement with the environment and develop visions of our future, both better and worse. Ecotopia considers nature in the broadest sense, and offers new perspectives on the planet that sustains, enchants, and, increasingly, frightens us.