Chapter 7 Wear Your Shelter: Climate Change Photography and Mary Mattingly’s Nomadographies
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Abstract
This essay investigates how climate change photographer and multimedia artist Mary Mattingly captures the dramatic impact humans exert on the environment during the Anthropocene. Its focus lies on her eco-critical “nomadographies,” in which she depicts a nomadic state of life in a hazardous environment. In her work, the supposedly “natural” risks that force people out of their homes on a global scale, and leave them homeless, have already run their course. As this essay demonstrates, the post-civilization ecosystems Mattingly creates and then interprets via photography perform practices of living in an increasingly toxic world. At the same time, her nomadographies are understood as an imaginary search for making these worn-out places habitable once more. To show the potential for migration in future conditions, Mattingly populates them with survivors. If homes can no longer be inhabited in one stationary place, her work suggests, they can likely be worn—hugged closer to one’s body.