Subhankar Banerjee, artist and activist, uses photography to raise awareness about issues that threaten the health and well-being of our planet.

Since 2000, he has focused on the American Artic. He works closely with indigenous communities there and his photographs have been instrumental in conservation efforts, including the debate over oil drilling, writes Geraldine Royds.

‘Photography has played a critical role in the American land conservation movement’ Banerjee says. ‘The medium not only helped preserve many important lands but also helped define how we relate to these lands, how we imagine them and our place in them’.

Banerjee believes that photography has tended to reinforce the separation of man from nature and, he says, he has tried to bridge that gap.

‘In my work, I approach the Arctic from the perspective of land-as-home, a place that sustains our species and numerous other species. In photographs of natural ecology, I attempt to address communities of species and their relationships to and dependence on the land and water. The beauty and the point of these images, I hope, is to inspire more responsible thoughts and relationships rather than to encourage entitlements. Perhaps at no time in the history of human kind has our planet’s ecological fabric been this degraded and life on earth so threatened. We need a new aesthetic vision that is attuned to the ideas of ecology and sustainability‘.

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