Panos Series – Alaskan Displacees and Fracking in North Dakota

These two photographic series from Panos Pictures photographers Vlad Sokhin and Joan Bardeletti are good examples of the climate visuals principles applied to a collection of imagery.

Our research highlighted the need to show ‘real people doing real things’. Both of these series personify the issue of climate change and demonstrate how it has an impact right now on individuals. Our research has shown that this is essential if we want to communicate the nuanced stories that make up the issue of climate change.

These two in-depth reportages demonstrate how multiple images or media can expand on a single frame to be more effective communications. These are excellent tools that should be embraced by visual communicators.

These images are curated from a larger body of work displayed in the Panos Collection.

Warm Waters – Newtok, Alaska
Vald Sokhin
On Alaska’s remote Bering Sea coast, citizens of the United States, the world’s largest economy and most powerful country, are fighting a desperate battle against the most serious environmental problem in human history: climate change. The roughly 400 residents of Newtok village who are mainly members of the Yupik native group voted in 2003 to relocate their entire community to higher ground but progress has been slow, hampered by logistical challenges and limited funds available for relocating a whole village in this most inhospitable terrain. Despite the will to move and the availability of federal assistance, Newtok’s residents face many of the same challenges as citizens of shrinking and disappearing island nations in the South Pacific with far fewer resources at their disposal. READ MORE

Black Gold in the Prairie
Joan Baredeletti
In the far reaches of North Dakota, close to the Canadian border, a remote and inhospitable landscape has turned into an El Dorado for oil companies forever searching for new reserves and for thousands of victims of the credit crunch. The result is social and logistical mayhem. The oil and shale gas wells in the Williston basin in North Dakota are among the most productive in the United States. They were discovered back in 1910, but remained unprofitable until the recent revolution in oil exploration technology with the introduction of hydraulic fracturing, or fracking. Now North Dakota is the second most productive oil producing state in the US, second only to Texas. READ MORE