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18 Principle: Understand your audience Insulation Installation Images that show people actively interacting with climate solutions are more powerful than images where people are passively observing them. Practical, ‘common sense’ actions like loft-insulation produce a positive emotional response. What it shows: A man insulating a loft in New Zealand. Photo by Simon Williams Principle: Be very careful with protest imagery Co-operation for Forestry Our research found some strong opposition among those who didn’t already consider themselves environmentalists to images of ‘typical protesters’, who they saw as neither authentic or credible. Showing people who are genuinely affected by decisions about land use or energy infrastructure is an alternative to showing demonstrations in city centres. What it shows: Peruvian Defense Minister meets with the first military contingent in the emergency areas to inspect the new river base of Puerto Ocopa. The military contingents will be responsible for fighting narcoterrorism including illegal logging. Photo by Luis Enrique Saldaña Principle: Show climate causes at scale Deepwater Horizon Spill The ‘tiny’ boats (in actual fact large tankers) illustrate the scale of the Deepwater Horizon disaster. Images like these are likely to generate negative emotional reactions and offer an opportunity to question the ‘security’ that fossil fuels claim to offer. What it shows: Fire boat response crews battle the 2010 Deepwater Horizon accident in the Gulf of Mexico. Photo by US Coast Guard something interesting in their political take on climate change and the images we were showing them. Another principle was about the scale at which you show the causes of climate change. We found that people were quite reactive in a negative way to being shown images of people, for example, eating meat or driving their car as a cause of climate change. But when you show people essentially the same thing, congested roads but at that collective scale, people were much more willing to recognise that as a cause of climate change. So there is something nuanced there which relates to more general climate communication advice around not making people feel guilty, because it can backfire. To make a final point, in terms of the current political context, we tested a range of protest images. We found that the classic imagery of people in face paint or just looking like traditional environmentalists (and the aesthetic that comes with that), pretty much across the board we found people were not interested in those images or actively didn’t like them. The thing that seemed to stick with people was that they didn’t believe that they were authentic and credible. They were quite cynical about their motives. Now I’m not saying that that’s fair but I think what’s different about the youth school protests is that that disappears completely. The reason it’s cut through and the reason it’s so powerful is that Greta and everyone else that’s taking part has this incredible authenticity about them that comes from their age and their lack of professional organisation as protesters. It’s clear that they mean it and it’s heartbreaking for that reason. PL: Tell me more about the actual agency side of this. Am I right in thinking that you are acting as a platform for other people to distribute their work through? How are you developing relationships with photographers and agencies and the end users – the editors and so on – how do you see yourself brokering that? AC: That’s a good way of putting it, we are playing a kind of broker role I think and that’s classically something that Climate Outreach has done more generally: be a bridge between research and practice. In many ways that’s what we are doing with Climate Visuals as well. The way it works is that we’ve built up our image library partly through creative commons content, but only partly. Lots of the library, the majority now, has been built up through a range of different agencies. That includes Panos and Magnum and most recently Alamy. We’ve identified a set of say, a hundred images, that match the Climate Visuals principles and we are hosting them on our website. What we do is add a caption that doesn’t just say what’s in the image but explains why that image is there, why we think it works, how it relates to our research. So people can start to get a feel for, ‘Ok if we want to produce this kind of reaction... If we want to convey this kind of idea... these are the kinds of images that we might want to use’. We are not trying to grow to be a global photo exchange. We recognise that what we are doing is sign-
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Climate Visuals Interview 19 Principle: Climate change impacts are emotionally powerful Typhoon Aftermath This image shows the human dimensions of the aftermath of a natural disaster. Our research suggests that showing the impacts of climate change on children can provoke strong emotions. What it shows: A young boy drags some bottles through the flooded streets of Metro Manila on 28 September 2009 after typhoon Ketsana hit the Philippines. Photo by Asian Development Bank posting and showcasing the really good work that’s out there. When you click on any image on the Climate Visuals website then, as well as the information about it, you get options to license or access the image. It takes you directly to where the rights are actually managed from; the original agency or the original rights holder. Where we are going next is to reach out and connect with the decision makers and gatekeepers within key media outlets, to support their working practices and decision making and the kinds of images that they foreground and reach for quickly. Obviously each institution has a different way of working, and competing pressures on how images are chosen, and we want to try and better understand that. I think once we get to the point where globally significant organisations are thinking in a slightly different way about climate imagery then all that wonderful content that is there will get that mainstream bandwidth in a way that at the moment it doesn’t. PL: What response have you had from editors and publications, how much are they coming to you now as a first stop when they are looking for climate related imagery? AC: I think it’s a combination. We do want them to use our current collection as a port of call to guide their selection but we are also doing curating for people. We’ve done that already for the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, their One Point Five Degrees report. We selected a set of twenty five images that fitted with the client visuals principles and illustrated all the different aspects of their report. We are doing a similar thing for the upcoming UN climate conference at the end of the year, selecting images that will reflect and highlight the themes of the conference. And we are now actively talking to editors, for example the Guardian’s team who are really active. They are talking about the ‘climate crisis’ and the ‘climate emergency’ instead of ‘climate change’ and there is a visual component to that which they recognise. So we’re talking to them at that strategic level about how they can better reflect their editorial direction of travel in imagery. PL: Are you considering perhaps working more directly with photographers or agencies on projects and trying to help them develop their ideas for stories or large scale projects on climate change? AC: We have already been having conversations along those lines with one very major agency about the prospect for a big project, a campaign really that, on the one hand, highlights a range of new climate stories around the world, and on the other hand, reflects the kind of visual principles. That would then be able to sit in a more prominent position within that agency. It is partly about the back end stuff as well. It still seems slightly mysterious to me exactly what combination of human editorial decision making and algorithmic guidance goes into what content appears, but there’s a back end aspect to which images are tagged, in which ways, how they appear when you search for certain terms and I think that’s part also of the advocacy that we want to do. PL: Could you define success for your initiative in say two or three years time? AC: Now we are focusing on the media gatekeepers and decision makers but what we are looking to do fairly soon is to run what we are calling a ‘baseline survey’ to make sure we’ve got an accurate check of where things are. In a couple of years time, I want and expect that baseline to have shifted, so that when you type ‘climate change’ into a search bar of Google and the mega agencies, we see different images coming up that better reflect Climate Visual’s recommendations. Because I think it all filters down from there, they are the wells that almost everyone draws from in one way or another and I think the smaller independent agencies, as you’d expect, are already closer to what we are talking about. The bigger more influential more dominant agencies and media outlets, once they start to shift in tone and editorial choice, it should stick around and at that point we’ve got a visual language that is more commensurate with the scale of the challenge and the urgency that we need to solve it.

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18

Principle: Understand your audience

Insulation Installation Images that show people actively interacting with climate solutions are more powerful than images where people are passively observing them. Practical, ‘common sense’ actions like loft-insulation produce a positive emotional response.

What it shows: A man insulating a loft in New Zealand. Photo by Simon Williams

Principle: Be very careful with protest imagery

Co-operation for Forestry Our research found some strong opposition among those who didn’t already consider themselves environmentalists to images of ‘typical protesters’, who they saw as neither authentic or credible. Showing people who are genuinely affected by decisions about land use or energy infrastructure is an alternative to showing demonstrations in city centres.

What it shows: Peruvian Defense Minister meets with the first military contingent in the emergency areas to inspect the new river base of Puerto Ocopa. The military contingents will be responsible for fighting narcoterrorism including illegal logging. Photo by Luis Enrique Saldaña

Principle: Show climate causes at scale

Deepwater Horizon Spill The ‘tiny’ boats (in actual fact large tankers) illustrate the scale of the Deepwater Horizon disaster. Images like these are likely to generate negative emotional reactions and offer an opportunity to question the ‘security’ that fossil fuels claim to offer.

What it shows: Fire boat response crews battle the 2010 Deepwater Horizon accident in the Gulf of Mexico. Photo by US Coast Guard something interesting in their political take on climate change and the images we were showing them. Another principle was about the scale at which you show the causes of climate change. We found that people were quite reactive in a negative way to being shown images of people, for example, eating meat or driving their car as a cause of climate change. But when you show people essentially the same thing, congested roads but at that collective scale, people were much more willing to recognise that as a cause of climate change. So there is something nuanced there which relates to more general climate communication advice around not making people feel guilty, because it can backfire. To make a final point, in terms of the current political context, we tested a range of protest images. We found that the classic imagery of people in face paint or just looking like traditional environmentalists (and the aesthetic that comes with that), pretty much across the board we found people were not interested in those images or actively didn’t like them. The thing that seemed to stick with people was that they didn’t believe that they were authentic and credible. They were quite cynical about their motives. Now I’m not saying that that’s fair but I think what’s different about the youth school protests is that that disappears completely. The reason it’s cut through and the reason it’s so powerful is that Greta and everyone else that’s taking part has this incredible authenticity about them that comes from their age and their lack of professional organisation as protesters. It’s clear that they mean it and it’s heartbreaking for that reason.

PL: Tell me more about the actual agency side of this. Am I right in thinking that you are acting as a platform for other people to distribute their work through? How are you developing relationships with photographers and agencies and the end users – the editors and so on – how do you see yourself brokering that? AC: That’s a good way of putting it, we are playing a kind of broker role I think and that’s classically something that Climate Outreach has done more generally: be a bridge between research and practice. In many ways that’s what we are doing with Climate Visuals as well. The way it works is that we’ve built up our image library partly through creative commons content, but only partly. Lots of the library, the majority now, has been built up through a range of different agencies. That includes Panos and Magnum and most recently Alamy. We’ve identified a set of say, a hundred images, that match the Climate Visuals principles and we are hosting them on our website. What we do is add a caption that doesn’t just say what’s in the image but explains why that image is there, why we think it works, how it relates to our research. So people can start to get a feel for, ‘Ok if we want to produce this kind of reaction... If we want to convey this kind of idea... these are the kinds of images that we might want to use’. We are not trying to grow to be a global photo exchange. We recognise that what we are doing is sign-

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