Passionate environmentalist Philip Jessup decided that warning people about climate change was no longer enough: he wanted them to see what they would soon be missing. The Toronto native took photographs of three diverse locations around the globe that will be made unrecognizable by climate change in this lifetime. These snapshots formed the basis for his latest photography exhibit, Imperiled Landscapes, opening May 14 at Dylan Ellis Gallery.
“I began to see changes in nature here at home in Toronto,” Jessup says. Knowing the subtle changes he viewed at home were magnified elsewhere, he travelled to record examples of natural beauty before they were lost.
The shutterbug went to Melbourne, Australia, and captured the watershed that highlights that the city that is slowly running dry, and he journeyed to Hong Kong to snap wetlands that are flooding due to rising sea levels.
Jessup also documented life in a small village in the Arctic, where shorter and warmer winters are having devastating effects on the local way of life. Climate change has altered everything in remote Arctic communities from softening the once-firm ice used to travel upon to shortening the hunting season, leaving many stranded and hungry, Jessup notes.
It is simply not enough, in the artist’s opinion, to make people fear what a new, post-climate-change world will look like: “The purpose [of these photos] is to capture the beauty of these wilderness landscapes, and bring that beauty to Toronto,” he says.
The resulting photos are candid portraits of scenes that may all too soon be fading from memory.
“I try to bring out colour and striking composition in my photos…and make the viewer wonder what’s surrounding the image but isn’t in it.”
See more of Jessup’s work here.
art@nowtoronto.com | @nowtoronto
