Abstract

Taking Richard Misrach’s & Kate Orff’s publication Petrochemical America as a starting point
for a range of debates, this chapter argues that environmental photography has a crucial
role to play in bringing about an awareness of environmental ethics, which can aid activists
and autonomous groups such as citizen scientists in their struggle against industrial
pollution. Key to this debate is the definition of environmental photography as a multimodal
and collaborative genre of cultural production, which promotes the political values of ecoanarchist
theories such as social ecology, through the medium of aesthetics.