Public Project
CENSORED LANDSCAPES
From Carleton Watkins to Ansel Adams to Robert Adams, American landscape photography has evolved in conjunction with the conservationist and environmental movement. In the late 20th century, landscape photographers, particularly those associated with the New Topographics exhibition, explored the human presence in the landscape. But farmed animals have almost entirely been omitted from the genre, despite their prodigious numbers (in the U.S. over 10 billion land animals and billions of marine animals are slaughtered every year for food). Their exclusion from landscape photography reflects their exclusion from environmental activism even though animal agriculture is a leading cause, if not the leading cause, of climate change, deforestation, ocean acidification, habitat destruction, loss of biodiversity, and mass species extinction.
The industry has a vested interest in suppressing any understanding of the environmental destruction, cruelty, health effects, and worker exploitation of animal agriculture and has attempted to pass “ag-gag” laws that criminalize photographing sites of animal agriculture in more than half of U.S. state legislatures. Despite the unconstitutionality of such laws, they have passed in seven states.
The animals that have been made invisible in the landscape are represented by numbers in bold black.
1,802
