My last blog post was a bit of background on the motivations of the project, so I won’t waste any of these precious 400 words discussing that further. Instead, I’ll introduce to you the finished product… The Future of Seattle online Photo Spotlight!
The intention of this project is to bring the effects of climate change and the impacts within the Anthropocene closer to home, in hopes of spurring an emotional response in the public. After all, we know what emotions lead us to- Action! These pictures are mostly of people native to Seattle, and they provoke thoughts about species loss, economic decline, and environmental health in our city. Each picture is related to a category (community, health, environment, and economy), all of which are extended upon in our website (linked here!).
The project itself went smoothly. Step one was to take the pictures, step two was to publish them with a website, and step three is to promote said content on social media. We are currently in the process of step three, with almost a hundred likes on our Facebook page (linked here) and nearly 50 followers on our Instagram page (linked here). We also collaborated with a local UW photographer by the name of Stuart Danford, who was kind enough to provide us with some amazing photos of our favorite city.
As a group, we learned the importance of connecting with people face to face, and realized how easy it is to step outside of our little bubbles to participate in the system we are inevitably tangled up in. We are motivated by emotional responses, and in our world, it is easy to distance ourselves from those negative emotions and delude ourselves into believing that the Anthropocene is not an imminent threat. When those emotions arise from visual stimuli like these pictures, or thousands of other mental scenes that we’ve seen through this class, it eliminates that ‘distance’ or mental ‘barrier’ and allows for that sense of urgency that is all too necessary if we want any sort of positive change to occur. In order to encourage others to achieve political agency and take action, we must uncover pieces of information that are shocking or personal to evoke it.