Most college freshmen weren’t even born in the year two thousand five. That year, Montreal hosted the United Nations Climate Change Conference. Government ministers, scientists, leaders of nongovernmental organizations and journalists gathered for this annual meeting of countries participating in the Kyoto Protocol, a policy aimed at reducing the emission of greenhouse gases.
American photographer Joel Sternfeld gained access to the conference using newspaper credentials. He said that he hoped to answer the question of whether climate change was real and that quote in the opinion of nearly all the participants, not only was climate change occurring, it was also about to reach a tipping point and become irreversible. End quote. Using a telephoto lens, Sternfeld trained his camera on a range of participants to create what he called an archive of humanity amid what was then a largely invisible ecological crisis. He said that he tried to take photographs of delegates at the moment when the horror of what they were hearing was visible on their faces.
Sternfeld published “When It Changed,” a book of these images, in two thousand seven. It outlines alarming scientific discoveries, the actions and inactions of governments and corporations and increasingly extreme weather events. An exhibition by the same name at the Georgia Museum of Art, on view through December first, presents the photographs from that book, nearly twenty years after they were taken. At this watershed moment in global environmental history, and in the face of an ever-unfurling stream of evidence, Sternfeld is emphatic: we cannot say that we did not know that our world had changed.