In a sweltering, crowded classroom in Dhaka, Bangladesh, a ten-year-old boy grips the first photograph he has ever taken. His small hands steady as he speaks passionately to his classmates about the image, which shows people collecting waste in his neighbourhood—the second-largest slum in Bangladesh's capital. Halfway around the world, beneath a white marquee at Melbourne's Sustainable Living Festival, a 65-year-old environmental activist leans forward in conversation, re-inspired by a photo-story from China depicting a young boy peering through home-made glasses constructed from drinking straws, offering a glimpse of what it may be like to see the world from the multiple compound eyes of a butterfly. 

These moments, separated by geography but connected by shared creative approaches, reveal the meaning-making possibilities that emerge when environmental storytelling transcends borders. They represent the essence of a multi-year participatory action-research project that challenges how we understand both environmental justice and the material nature of images themselves—an exploration that finds particular relevance as contemporary art grapples with the urgency of ecological crisis and the politics of representation.

The Global Material Landscape of Environmental Images

Contemporary environmental photography too often falls into predictable, generic tropes: the pristine ‘untouched’ wilderness demanding protection, the dystopian wasteland warning of collapse, or the shiny futuristic green technologies promising salvation. These images, while impactful through their often highly-stylised aesthetics, neglect something less spectacular—the material and relational basis of the local communities that invisibly experience and shape environmental change. In our hyperconnected age, the urgent question becomes: how can photography help visualise the invisible acts of environmental care that have the potential to connect disparate communities across the world?

My research project Portraits of Change emerged from this invitation, deploying photovoice methods—grassroots participatory practices through which communities document and interpret their own experiences through photography—across three contrasting sites: Bangladesh, Australia, and China. Rather than distilling distinct ‘visual truths’ from each site through data analysis, the project foregrounded diverse environmental stories rooted in the material realities of place and created conditions for cross-cultural dialogue and solidarity.  Throughout this essay, ‘researchers’ refers to myself and the site-based collaborators who facilitated workshops, discussions, and exhibitions across Bangladesh, China, and Australia.

The Persistence of Materiality in a Digital Age

As our image-making technologies become increasingly ethereal from a user-standpoint—invisible cloud storage, instant borderless sharing, seamless digital manipulation—the research revealed the enduring importance of material engagement with photography itself. While images can travel instantaneously across digital networks, they remain weightless,  with their power to transform environmental understanding depending on embodied, locally grounded, relational engagement.

Cameras as Technological and Relational Tools

These material dimensions began with the cameras themselves. Seven-year-old donated Blackberry phones, carried physically from Melbourne to Dhaka, became the essential tools for primary and secondary students who had no other means of creating images. The reverence with which many participants treated these devices—worn and outdated by Australian standards—stood in stark contrast to their disposability and neglect in their country of origin. These cameras were not only technological tools; they were relational tools, becoming portals to expanded possibilities, enabling young people to document and share their environmental experience both within and beyond their own communities for the first time.

In Beijing, some participants found these same phones amusingly antiquated, as they captured and shared photo-stories instantly through WeChat using the latest handsets. In Dhaka, a separate group of tertiary students could create and discuss environmental stories using their own devices and Facebook. Just two kilometres away, primary school workshops with students from marginalised communities revealed a markedly different experience: encountering digital photography for the first time through the project. These localised ‘digital divides’ were not simply obstacles to overcome, but material conditions shaping how environmental stories could be told, by whom, and with what resources.

Tactile Foundations of Image-Making

The research consistently revealed that the most transformative moments occurred not in the private, individual digital realm of image viewing and sharing but in the physical acts of image-making. Participants lead researchers through their urban environments, narrating issues as they went, cameras in hand. Printed photo-stories were physically passed around, brought into different relationships, and considered by many eyes, hands and voices sharing the same intimate spaces and life-worlds. These face-to-face discussions enabled the images to become catalysts for deeper reflections on environmental relationships.

Following children through the narrow streets of Korail ‘slum’ in Dhaka with their ‘new’ cameras, the researchers observed how the act of walking and looking expanded beyond just the image-technological frame. These material engagements—feet on uneven ground, eyes adjusting to different light, hands steadying cameras—grounded the image-making in the participants' lived experiences in ways that purely digital processes could not replicate.

Seeing Beyond Surfaces: Environmental Justice Through Different Eyes

The photo-stories that emerged from these community-based workshops challenged dominant environmental visual narratives in profound ways, revealing how local environmental justice issues are always already connected to global material flows and power relations.

These community-based workshops challenged dominant environmental visual narratives in profound ways, revealing how local environmental justice issues are connected to global material flows and power relations. One striking example concerns plastic and environmental health: Australian participants often depicted plastic bags and packaging as environmental threats to be reduced or eliminated, while some participants in Bangladesh advocated for ground spices to be sold in sealed plastic packets because of pervasive airborne pollutants. Read together, these contrasting photo-stories show how the meaning of plastic shifts across uneven environmental conditions, health risks, and survival strategies.

These images of spices exposed on roadsides communicated the local environmental health perspectives far more effectively than words alone, revealing how such environmental risks are visualisable for participants facing them, while remaining outside of experience in Melbourne (and most of the ‘Global North’). These environmental justice dimensions are multi-fold and intersecting. For instance participants in Bangladesh reside not only in a country with less adaptive capacity for environmental risks but also in areas where health risks are materially present in ways that demanded different survival strategies.

In/Visibility

Other photo-stories revealed subtle critiques of environmental aesthetics and the politics of visibility. For instance, one participant from Beijing created a photo-story that invited viewers to see beyond superficial nature aesthetics—trees lining roadsides—to perceive hidden pollution from concealed factory emissions. The faces of participants appeared as ghostly reflections in glass, calling attention to the viewer's own role in these environmental misperceptions. The image emerged as a powerful example of how visual communication can illustrate the difference between surface appearances and deeper systemic realities.

These ghostly reflections became metaphors for broader questions about in/visibility in photo-storytelling, and the audience-subject relationship in transboundary contexts. For example, much of the air pollution in China results from manufacturing consumer goods for export markets, implicating Australian and other Global North viewers in both the literal visual opacity of smoggy skies and the ethical relationships embedded in these global consumption patterns.

Gendered Environmental Landscapes

Environmental justice also emerged through gendered experiences of public space. One Bangladeshi participant created a photo-story about the health benefits of close contact with natural environments in Dhaka. When asked to elaborate during a public exhibition, she explained that she felt considerably freer in these natural settings—a significant statement given the highly gendered nature of public space participation in Dhaka, where religious and cultural norms can limit women's access to public areas.  The photo-story thus transformed environmental health from an abstract concept into a lived experience of spatial freedom, revealing how environmental access intersects with gender, class, and cultural dynamics in ways that purely policy-focused environmental discussions often miss.

Cross-Cultural Dialogues

The project also experimented with direct forms of cross-cultural dialogue, including letter exchanges between youth participants in Australia and Bangladesh, revealing how environmental concerns transcended cultural and linguistic boundaries while simultaneously foregrounding the real differences in environmental experiences across the sites. Australian students expressed fears of their country becoming like China, ‘where one rarely if ever sees the beautiful blue sky because of people polluting’, while some Chinese participants created photo-stories pleading that capturing the sky's beauty should be an everyday reality rather than a luxury.  These exchanges opened pathways for recognising environmental interdependencies: the material flows that connect local environmental impacts across global supply chains, the shared vulnerabilities that climate change creates across different communities, and the ways that environmental care manifests differently depending on local conditions and constraints.

The Territory That Escapes the Map

Perhaps most significantly, the research revealed how environmental understanding emerges through what cannot be easily documented or digitised. This is the ‘territory which always escapes the map’—the visceral experiences of sweating in humid Dhaka streets, shivering while searching for NGO offices in Beijing apartments, and wandering dry Melbourne school playgrounds to the sound of cicadas. These embodied experiences were the foundations that enabled the creation and sharing of the environmental photo-stories that became sites of cross-cultural learning and solidarity.

Implications for Contemporary Visual Environmental Practice

The research offers several key insights for contemporary artists, activists, and researchers working at the intersections of environmental justice and visual culture: that material engagement remains essential, how the global/local operate in environmental justice and how cross-cultural environmental dialogue requires symmetry.

In an era of rapidly increasing digitalisation, this project demonstrates that meaningful environmental storytelling still requires material, embodied engagement. The physical act of exploring local environments, holding cameras, printing and sharing photo-stories by hand creates different possibilities for environmental understanding than purely digital processes. This invites contemporary environmental art practices to maintain their traditional tactile, place-based elements even when incorporating digital technologies.

The research challenges approaches to environmental justice that focus exclusively on local impacts without considering global material flows and power relations. Environmental issues like air pollution, plastic waste, and climate change are already deeply transnational, shaped by global supply chains, trade relationships, and uneven development patterns. Effective environmental visual culture needs to make these connections visible while remaining grounded in specific place-based experiences.

The project's success in fostering meaningful dialogue between participants from different countries depended on creating more symmetrical relationships than typical North-South environmental partnerships. Rather than positioning some participants as environmental educators and others as learners, or as service-providers and beneficiaries, the project enabled participants to meaningfully engage—including selecting, ideating and refining—with photo-stories from any site and respond based on their own lived experiences. This approach offers lessons for environmental art practices that seek to connect across cultural and economic differences.

The research confirms that the way environmental issues are visualised fundamentally shapes what kinds of environmental responses become possible. Taken together, these examples suggest that environmental images matter not only for what they depict, but for the material conditions of their making, circulation, and reception. When environmental photography focuses on ‘un-touched’ wilderness or technological solutions, it can obscure the lived experiences of environmental injustice that shape daily life for many communities. Participatory visual methods offer pathways that create a framework to meaningfully centre community perspectives while challenging dominant environmental narratives.

Conclusion: Grounding Hope in Material Relations

As environmental crises multiply and environmental inequalities deepen, the temptation exists to retreat into either technological optimism or apocalyptic despair. The Portraits of Change research suggests a different path: grounding environmental hope in the grassroots materiality and social relations that can be the springboard for connecting communities across geographic, cultural and economic differences while respecting the specificities of place-based environmental experience.

The photo-stories created through this research shared themes of both fear and hope. Fear that homes, streets, waterways, and air were becoming increasingly polluted, alongside concerns for the plants and animals in participants' neighbourhoods. There is hope that small acts of environmental care could inspire broader transformation. These stories provided rich, complex, discursive and embodied opportunities for participants to think, feel and act beyond their cultural, linguistic and economic differences.

The research also reveals how environmental visual culture can create spaces for inter-species empathy—opportunities for recognising the voices of plants and animals asking for the opportunity to be seen, felt and heard. In an era when environmental crises threaten the survival of countless species, this expansion of visual empathy beyond human communities becomes both urgent and essential.

The material engagement with environmental photography works on multiple levels: grounding environmental understanding in embodied experience, while opening pathways for recognising environmental interdependencies that span the globe. In these situated connections lie possibilities for environmental futures that honour both local specificities and global solidarity, material presence and digital circulation, individual agency and collective transformation.

It has been through embodied connections between and within these contrasting worlds—of people, cameras, photo-stories, letters—which have created spaces for encountering and witnessing different relationships with the natural world, and through this, the promise of different ethics of environmental care. In an era of environmental crisis, such embodied, materially grounded visual practices offer crucial pathways toward environmental futures that are both imaginable and achievable.