Ep 7 - Photography Adjacent f/N Changing the Future

This week on Photography Adjacent, I sat down for a chat with Neal Haddaway, a man who wears many hats, including environmentalist, computer developer, activist and photojournalist.

From his sunny spot in Bangor, North Wales, we discussed his journey, deeply entwined with the environment. Neal is on a mission to reveal our planet's fragility and inspire us to introspectively and actively seek a different path for our future.

He believes in the responsibility of holding a camera, especially for photojournalists. "It's not just about capturing an image," Neal shared. "It's about understanding the ripple effect that image might create. My years at the intersection of science and policy taught me that change is often more intricate than we anticipate."

Since childhood, Neal has been driven by a desire to enhance public awareness of our environment's precarious state. "I've always wanted to amplify how precious and fragile our planet is," he said. This passion, somewhat obscured during his academic pursuits, has come full circle, merging his varied interests into a unified purpose.

His recent work in Almería, Spain, exemplifies this, uncovering the complex dynamics of environmental degradation and human exploitation and compelling us to dig deeper. By blending drone photography's expansive views with intimate ground narratives, Neal's approach offers a new lens to understand these pressing issues.

His endeavours highlight the influential role of images in shaping our engagement with and actions towards environmental challenges. Neal stresses the importance of ongoing dialogue and comprehensive strategies to address these systemic challenges, extending beyond the ephemeral nature of news cycles.

Reflecting on the diverse narratives presented in the media, Neal points out the erosion of public trust and the increasing skepticism towards images and words. "Photography, especially when presented as a series, has the power to narrate stories in a way that fosters a deeper understanding and appreciation of their impact," he remarked.

Delving into the agricultural expanses of Almería revealed the hidden environmental and social tolls of our dietary choices. "This region plays a crucial role in supplying the UK with fresh produce during winter," Neal observed, underscoring the need for a holistic reassessment of our food systems, given their profound implications for human rights and environmental sustainability.

As we wrapped up our chat, it struck me how Neal's lens, much like his journey, captures more than just images—it captures hope, urgency, and a call to action. This isn't just Neal's story; it's a roadmap for all of us, urging us to pick up our cameras, pens, or tools to highlight, challenge, and change. It's clear now, more than ever, that through Neal's eyes and our actions, we can indeed ƒ/N change the future.

Tom Trevatt (00:03)

Neal Haddaway welcome to Photography Adjacent. Thank you very much for joining us. You're calling from North Wales at the moment, aren't you?

Neal (00:17)

Yeah, thanks very much, Tom. It's really good to be here chatting with you. I'm here in Bangor, sunny North Wales for the time being. It's not currently raining.

Tom Trevatt (00:25)

Okay, fantastic. So for people who don't know who you are, let's have a little bit of a rundown of all the many things that you do.

Neal (00:34)

Yeah, so where to begin? I have spent most of the last 20 years or so working in environmental science, actually. So I feel a bit of a fraud being on your podcast, but I've been working for about 20 years in what we call the science policy interface. So as an environmental researcher looking at things like agriculture, sustainability, international development, and how they can be used to improve decision making, so how we can make better decisions in the way that we look after the planet and people. And I was living in Sweden up until about 2020, then moved to Germany for a couple of years. And in 2022, I changed career and started a master's in photojournalism and documentary photography, which brought me back to the UK, to London, at London College of Communication. And I really enjoyed changing things up a bit, I actually wanted to switch into photography completely really away from what I was doing in research. And through that process of changing the way that I think and trying to think a bit more creatively, I've reignited my interest in the environment. And so what I do now is a combination of research in environmental science, research into how we use imagery to talk about the environment in the media and working as a photographer and a photojournalist. And the photojournalism work that I am interested in is mainly around food systems and the impact that capitalism has on the environment. So very much come full circle that what I really wanted to do as a kid was to raise public awareness about how precious and delicate our environment is. And I've sort of got lost along the way a little bit in the academia, but I've really got back to what I want to be doing now. So it's nice to be combining all of those passions together.

Tom Trevatt (02:43)

I mean, maybe not lost in the academia, but it feels like it could be a bit of a training ground for the place that you found yourself now. Presumably you still do work within academia or have you completely switched?

Neal (02:55)

Yeah, no, having made the public announcement on social media that I was leaving academia in 2020, I've now had to go back on myself. I'm in a very lucky position where I can work freelance, mentoring and giving advice and training people in that science policy stuff that I got very good at. But I'm also now working one day a week at a university in Shropshire called Harper Adams University, which focuses on agriculture. And it's there that I'm doing this very specific project looking at how the media uses imagery to talk about agricultural research. So there's a nice compartmentalization, but sort of overlap there really. So I have come back into academia.

Tom Trevatt (03:44)

don't think we ever leave, do we? We pretend to ourselves that we're going to leave it or we say maybe at some point we'll leave, but I don't know. It's always kind of claws us back in. Or maybe, I don't know.

Neal (03:46)

Yeah.

It's very true. You can't take the academic out of -

Yeah, you can take the academic out of academia, but you can't take the academia out of the academic. I think it's central to everything I'm interested in really.

Tom Trevatt (03:59)

Yeah, no, you can't know.

Yeah, and I think in many ways

I think in many ways, like we have this kind of love hate relationship with academia, right? I mean, certainly from my perspective, it's feels like that. Uh, there's, there's something that, that comes from being part of this system that both kind of needs you, but hates you at the same time, or like, you know, sort of treats you like it hates you. So there's this kind of constant feeling of there being this like sort of unhealthy toxic relationship that's developed because you've got this kind of like pull and tug of, uh,

Neal (04:27)

Yeah.

Tom Trevatt (04:39)

of the need versus the want. But you know, we love it and we hate it. So tell me more about this photojournalism stuff, which is obviously why we ostensibly why I've invited you on to have a conversation with me today, because this is, you know, broadly a photography based podcast. What's happening there?

Neal (04:59)

Yeah. So I think the first major project that I did was last year during my masters, I was lucky enough to go to the south of Spain to go and have a look at the greenhouse agriculture in a province called Almería. And what was really interesting to me was that this region is so integral to everything that we eat that's fresh fruit and vegetables in the winter in the UK. And yet we have no idea, the vast majority of people have no idea that it's there. So as a bit of background, Almeria in the 1940s was one of the poorest places in Europe. It suffered from famine. And in around the 1970s, they started to put money into improving the water infrastructure. They started using greenhouses to grow fruit and vegetables. The great thing about this region, it's the South East of Spain. It's very warm. It's very sunny all year round.

It doesn't have major extremes of temperature because it's on the coast, so it really lends itself well to agriculture. But the problem is that the industry has expanded so rapidly that there are now huge social -economical problems in the region caused by over -extraction of groundwater. So only a fifth of the water that they need for the fruit and veg comes from rain, the rest is all sucked up from the ground, as deep as a kilometre below the surface now. They produced 33 ,500 tons of basically cling film plastic that's covering the greenhouses that needs to be replaced every year. A lot of it's thrown away. There's a lot of chemicals that get pumped into the soil and the labor force for the 32 ,000 hectares of greenhouses there.

They have about 100 ,000 laborers who work in the greenhouses all year round, and 80 % of them are undocumented migrants who come from largely West Africa and North Africa. And they're paid really poorly. They live in really bad conditions. And this is all to produce three and a half million tons of fruit and vegetables a year that gets mostly exported to places like Germany and the UK. So this is where really my interest in photojournalism and highlighting problems with our food systems and the way that we live came from.

Tom Trevatt (07:29)

It's very interesting because obviously, you know, we can read statistics about these things or we can look at news reports. But is there something that you're saying here that, I mean, clearly you're saying this, that the photography in itself lends something to communicating something that's uncommunic, uncommunicable through words.

Neal (07:54)

to some degree. I have a problem with the way that the media frames issues like these because when they do arise, they arise as individual events. So maybe there's been a report about modern slavery or some drought that causes a problem. Do you remember last January, 2023, you couldn't buy tomatoes? They were really difficult. The supermarkets ran out.

Tom Trevatt (08:20)

Mm -hmm. Yeah.

Neal (08:22)

So the way that's framed in the media is largely around a single issue focus. I can understand why the news cycles run that way. But what I'm really interested in is not only using photography to visualize these things differently and storytelling and personal stories and portraiture come into that, but to try to keep these stories in the public eye for longer so that we realize that these are chronic systemic problems and that they are problems that are systems level problems. We need to think about them holistically and not just from a plastic pollution or water pollution or water scarcity issue, which is how they're dealt with in the media. And I think photography has that power, particularly photography used in photo essays because it's not just a single image, which is often how we absorb imagery through the media. It's a single image with a story. And I think the historic way of using photography and photojournalism is to use an image as illustration for a story, assuming that people get the information from the text. And I was just reading today that someone has shown that images are 60 ,000 times more influential in terms of information absorption compared to text.

Tom Trevatt (09:47)

Mm -hmm.

Neal (09:49)

And I don't think we really appreciate how powerful images are either in terms of the people who use them in the media or in terms of us absorbing information and not really realizing the narrative that's being pushed within that image. So the narrative that we see in an image in a left -wing newspaper is quite different from the image that will be used in the right -wing newspaper. You can see this if you ever look at images of right -wing politicians in The Guardian, they're always pulling funny faces.

And that's a pretty obvious way of subtly eroding public trust in a certain politician or a certain party. But there are loads of other ways that imagery is used that are less obvious, that are much more subtle. And so I think the power of photography as a series, as a story, as documentary film even, is something that's not really, I don't think appreciated as much as it should be. So that's really where my passion comes from. It's from trying to tell stories through connected images, but ones that are really heavily linked to research evidence. That's my background in science is all about making sure that it's robust evidence that's behind these claims. And so that's where my love of imagery and my passion for making photography really links with my very logical evidence -based brain, I think.

Tom Trevatt (11:15)

Nice. And how do we see this image? I mean, this isn't the throwaway comment, this isn't a throwaway question, but presumably the answer to the problem in your mind is that we see images and through that kind of witnessing of these kinds of the deleterious effects on the earth, let's say that you're highlighting, that we then make some kind of political change that there was enough people together that say no or stop or let's do something to make some change. Is that the process? Is that what happens? Like, you know, how do we, you know, it's all very well taking these photographs and they sit on someone's hard drive or sit on someone's website or Instagram account with a few hundred thousand, you know, a few thousand followers or whatever, but it's not really just that, is it? Because it's really much more, it's much more than that. The process of communication needs to spread beyond just the taking and display of images.

Neal (12:21)

Yeah, I agree. I think it is incredibly complex. And I mean, I got asked the other day what my theory of change was for a documentary that I'm proposing. And I think that's something we have to bear in mind as photojournalists, as photographers, that it's not just enough to take an image to make a photograph. We have to think about how that photograph could be used. And 20 years of working in science policy has made me realize that a lot of the theories of change, a lot of the reasons that we want to do work to have an impact are maybe overstretching a bit that actually, I mean, the whole of science buys into this information deficit model where the model says that all we need is better information and then politicians will make better choices. People will make better choices when they buy things if they just know where they came from, if they just know the calorie content.

Tom Trevatt (13:11)

Yeah.

Neal (13:18)

They just know the carbon footprint. And it's a fallacy. It's a fallacy that's partly pushed by neoliberalism, but it's not true. What also happens in neoliberalism is that there's an intentional overload of information. And that's what we're seeing really over the last 10 years, I think, is that the amount of information that we absorb is increasing exponentially. And particularly going back to my comment before where there's evidence that we absorb 60 ,000 times more efficiently information from images than text. We are now absorbing information. That's why we flick through images so quickly on social media. That's why when you go to the news, it's like 70 % imagery in the news landing pages. And you can absorb a lot of information just from an image and a title. And I think, we do need to think very carefully. Your question is a really good one because we do need to think really carefully about why we are doing what we're doing. I think for me, it's important to think about these pivot points of power, just to come up with a triple P, but where you can have leverage in a system. And a lot of the time it is through pressuring politicians and taking choice away from them.

Whereas previously we thought about just giving them enough information to make a moral choice. We know now from, this is particularly one of the reasons I left science, we know now because of the, we knew exactly what to do in terms of the climate crisis, no more fossil fuels. And that science is being ignored because of financial interests and vested interests. So what we need to do now is force them into change. And I think are really powerful ways to do that with storytelling. If you just look at the example from the UK recently of the scandal that we've had in the post office that happened 20 odd years ago, where an IT system was falsely claiming that people were stealing money. I don't know, dozens, hundreds of postmasters and postmistresses were taken to court and their lives were ruined. We've known about this for a decade and people have been campaigning and people have been pushing this message so hard. The only time politicians change is when there is a popular ITV, I think, TV series that comes out about it. And it's because it captured the public interest. It really is about storytelling. It's about having a powerful story that makes people stop and sit up and say, that's not right. And then when you put that to politicians and they realize that the public really, and I mean like most of the public really have a problem with it, they are then forced, their hand is forced. So I think a lot of the models that we have about how we think information changes people's minds and how images as information changes people's minds is fundamentally misunderstood. But I do think there are tools that photography in particular has a real power to wield that can drive change.

Tom Trevatt (16:55)

I want to pick up on a couple of things because I think there's both a kind of a solution and a kind of there's a solution and a kind of problem within the within the sort of formation of this idea, which is essentially that the critique that you had at the beginning, which was the news cycle can only really understand these kinds of major systems problems at a kind of individual level, let's say, kind of like individual occasions of drought, individual occasions of worker unrest, individual occasions of transport problems. I, it's, it's deeply liberal in the sense that it's analysis always rests on the idea that these problems or these these issues arise because of individual situations or individual people. Now, obviously, we then, you know,

We understand the kind of liberalness of that analysis. We understand it's kind of failure to take into consideration the systemic issues that we're facing as a species and as a planet. But what it seems to me is that when we say something like, creating a series of stories through imagery will force change.

I'm not saying this is exactly what you're saying, but there's a lot of analysis that presupposes the idea that political change comes through enough people seeing something and then therefore changing their belief systems. And I think that what I want to get to the heart of here, and I think this is actually when you talked about your sort of theory of change, theory of political change comes from. I think this is actually the heart of my concept of political change is essentially that a liberal concept of change comes through addition, i .e. one plus one plus one plus one plus one, i .e. enough people. This is kind of democracy, like liberal democracy operates in this way, right?

Enough people voting in this particular way will make this particular change happen. Now, of course, sometimes that works. Sure. But I like to think of political change through multiplication, which is to say that it's not just that one plus one plus one plus one plus one equals seven or whatever it is, but one plus one plus one actually is like one times one times two times three times four, you know, that kind of multiplicatory effect. That's where you actually get a kind of a leveraging or sort of sort of, to use political terminology, the kind of the capacity to leverage power in a way that shifts the hegemonic landscape, right? It produces an environment in which, and actually, I think the way this happens is through organization. And I presume that you would agree with me on this one, that political organization is precisely the way that, you know, 10 people equal 100 or, you know, we're like greater than the sum of our parts.

And it is actually, that's the way that like, let's say something like the party operates, if we're to take broadly the idea of a political party, that it's, you know, it's actually a small handful of MPs, but they leverage political power through that kind of multiplicatory aspect of political representation. And I think that this is actually where, like, you know, some people listening might know this, but I teach on an art course in the art course is particularly concerned with the idea of political change and art's capacity to produce political change. This for me feels like where a lot of art analysis, political analysis around art, misunderstands art's capacity to produce political change, because it essentially says, here is a problem, here's the problem, here's my critique of the problem. And all I want to do is see a lot of people to see it.

And as soon as a lot of people see it, then surely there's going to be some political change happen. And of course, actually what happens is that really what happens is that we just kind of fall into our little slots, our predetermined little slots of, of sort of, you know, our, our already existing biases. You know, you and I might go and see an art exhibition about climate change and be like, God damn it, the world sucks. We need to make some change and, oh, this is, this guy's right. But you know, somebody with maybe some other political allegiances, other commitments might be their confirmation bias might be reinforced. And I think this comes back to where you set, where you talk about the idea of an image produces 60 ,000 more somethings of information, bits of information than text, right? Yes, it might do. But does it do it in a way that actually changes minds?

Does it do it in a way that actually produces change or is it just a kind of a way to reinforce confirmation bias? You say, you go to a website and you see all those photographs of those people. Like you say, the right -wing politician pulling a funny face. For me, for you, that might be something like, oh, this guy, yeah, I can't trust him. But for some other member of the public who sees that, do they see that person and go, ah.

guy's not too bad. He's a bit of a joker, a bit of a laugh the way that people think about Boris Johnson. Right. So I do agree with you in the sense that like storytelling is absolutely vital to this process. I just think that we need to be careful that we don't see it as the only tool in the toolbox, if that makes sense.

Neal (22:44)

Yeah, no, I 100 % agree. And I think the reason that the documentary, it wasn't a documentary, but the reenactment of the post office scandal drama was so influential. No one really knows. It is likely to be something to do with the fact that we've got a general election this year. It's likely to do with the fact that we have a large turning against the Tory party.

It is not because it's a good story. It's because of all the other things that mean that a good story gets taken up. But what won't work is if you have a bad story. And I think for photographers out there, for photojournalists out there, people who are wanting to tell stories, I think you have to really embrace and research how to be a good storyteller if you want that story to stick. And I think there's a lot of, I'm not saying that single imagery used in journalism isn't a good thing, but I think journalists in particular and editors need to make sure that they are well versed in the power that they have as agents of information when they are selecting which images to run. Because the way that we see the framing of debates is

Tom Trevatt (23:58)

Absolutely.

Neal (24:05)

largely influenced by imagery because we are visual people. Text is something that is relatively recent to human evolution. It may even not really be registering evolutionary yet, but the way that we get information from text is not intuitive to us. That's what we have to learn to read. But everybody can sort of see an image and can understand the information within that image to some degree based on their cultural and experiential background. So,

Tom Trevatt (24:33)

That's insane. I just realized we don't learn to see images. We don't learn to see, but we learn to read. That's mind blowing.

Neal (24:42)

There is some degree of learning that needs to take place appreciating that a 2D representation is representational of 3D, particularly when there's some degree of abstraction. And so we are taught culturally from an early age that a 2D representation is totally expected and how to then turn that into our understanding of what it represents from a 3D perspective. But if you show someone a landscape,

Tom Trevatt (24:48)

Hmm.

Neal (25:12)

2D landscape, they will be able to understand that that is a representation of a landscape that they've experienced. Yeah. And there are language systems in the world that are pictorial based and they don't have the same, what we call semantic leap. You don't have to then make it because the word sausage looks nothing like a sausage. It sounds nothing like a sausage, but we all know in English what a sausage is.

Tom Trevatt (25:20)

Fantastic.

Neal (25:39)

And that is a complete abstraction. It's a completely abstract concept for a sausage. And yet it's something that we can all process. And there are some language systems that are, if you say it enough, it stops meaning anything.

Tom Trevatt (25:50)

to know.

You're good.

I think the post office scandal is really capturing attention or it's really having headway politically because there's a major legal case ongoing about it at the moment. Presumably that's...

Neal (26:10)

It has been going on for a very long time though. So the, I mean, it's like 2016 or something that the first, the first moves were happening. But I think a lot of it comes down to political fear. So the action is happening because of the fear of inaction, the fear of what would happen if politically nothing happened. And the same thing will happen with climate change. The same thing will happen with, you know,

other issues in the world, that it will reach a tipping point where we can no longer sell arms to a power that is committing war crimes. And that is carrying on even though you ask the average person on the street, they won't want it. You show them what's happening, they won't want it. You show the politicians, they'll feel personally sad about it. But action only happens when like, you know, it's...

Tom Trevatt (26:52)

you

Neal (27:09)

you really have to have so much pressure behind that system. And that is really depressing as a person who works in science communication. But, you know, it's this passion for storytelling, telling a human story, whether that's a story about people or a story about the environment, telling a story about, you know, a system that you want to change that shouldn't be the way it is. I think we've got to carry on telling those stories, even if...

the systems that should be using that information in a morally appropriate way are not.

Tom Trevatt (27:45)

We're going to move off this very shortly. I just want to ask or pose one more, one more question really. Um, when you say stories.

What do you mean by stories? Sorry, that's a too abstract way of -

Neal (28:05)

Well, I think it's the Walt Disney approach, sort of Pixar. Pixar do it really well. Beginning, middle and end, once upon a time there was blah, blah, blah, and blah, blah, blah, but blah, blah, blah. So blah, blah, blah. And then blah, blah, blah. Is that like, it's what we have now reinvented as a Western concept is an integral part of Aboriginal, of indigenous storytelling.

And that is how for tens of thousands of years, if not longer, information has passed down between generations. And it works because it is it. Aristotle's three modes of persuasion, which I am apparently pulling out in every conversation I have these days, but logos, which is information, the logic, the ethos, which is authority, which is that you're trustworthy, and the pathos, which is the emotive moving part. And Aristotle said you need all three in order to change someone's opinion or move someone. And I think they're really important cornerstones. Science relies on ethos and logos and ignores pathos. The right wing rely on pathos and assume ethos and totally abandon logos. And if you can combine all three, then you can have an evidence -based story that is based on good research, based on authority, people trust it, and it can be moving.

So I think that's what I mean by story really. It's something that has those three legs of a chair, those cornerstones, and that sometimes can be formulaic and it tends to work quite well if it's formulaic.

Tom Trevatt (29:46)

In a way also you need to be able to feel yourself in the position of the character of the story, presumably. So that, that actually, we were going to move on to something else, but maybe this links this, which is to do with empathy. Cause presumably let's say you're producing a series of portraits of people affected by this, this Spanish industry.

Let's say, as an example.

What is the pathos that we are feeling when we're looking at those photographs? Because presumably we want to, you want people to feel some form of empathy with a struggle of some sort. And I wonder, and I'm thinking about this because this is kind of part of something that I'm interested in.

that, that empathy that we might feel for somebody else. Does it come from, let's say, if I were in that scenario, I, if I put myself in that person's shoes, I would feel like this, or does it come from a sort of non -identificatory solidarity with that person? I, I could never feel what it, what it is to be in this person's shoes and therefore I'm not going to base my politics on an assumption of that. I am not going to assume that I know what it's like to be in their shoes, but I'm going to act as though I am in solidarity with that person. And I think there's two very, very different ways of looking at an image and producing empathy through pathos that cash out in two very, very distinct, different political outcomes.

Neal (31:45)

Yeah, I mean, for me, that's the difference between sympathy and empathy. I saw a nice explanation of someone suffering from depression and it was a rabbit stuck down a hole. And the visual definition of empathy is for someone to climb down into the hole, sit next to them, to feel the cold and the dark in the hole and say like, this feels really awful. I'm with you.

Tom Trevatt (31:57)

See you in a minute.

Yeah, I've seen it a long time ago, yeah, yeah, yeah.

Neal (32:12)

And sympathy is this person who comes along, sticks their head down the hole and goes like, God, that's really awful down there. Do want a sandwich? And it's not to say that sympathy and empathy don't have their places, but it is that your right empathy is to take on someone's pain and to experience what that pain is like based on your own experience or your own ability to put yourself in their shoes. Sympathy is to say, I can't imagine what that's like, but ethically, morally, I feel moved to do something or say something. So, I mean, I've been in the settlements in this village where there's no running waters, no sanitation. I was invited into this beautiful woman's home and sat with her and spent a lot of time with her. And that really affected me, it's still not empathy because I don't know what it's like to, I can try to put myself in that position, but it's still not fully empathy because I don't know what that experience is like. So I think when we're dealing with something that is so alien to so many people, it's going to be impossible to expect empathy, but sympathy is sort of what we can aim for and hope for. But I do think that depends on, cultural and political background, the degree to which you are able to empathize or sympathize with people who you think are like you is different. And that's not to say that there's something that's wrong there, but I'm just gonna be careful about how I say this, that when you see someone who looks like you, who is from a society like you, suffering, it's easier to imagine what that feels like. So it's easier to empathize. But that doesn't mean you feel less when it's someone who comes from a different culture or doesn't look like you, because you then sympathize more than you can empathize, perhaps. So I'm not so worried about whether it's sympathy or empathy. And maybe there is a difference in the way that you tell your stories, but I think there's such a difference between individuals and how they feel something for someone whose story they're reading, that if we focus too much on what they should be feeling and how, you might alienate some people, you might not reach people in the right way. So I think the trick there is to tell a story in a way that can move in a move a person in a way that is comfortable for them. I don't exactly know how you do that, but I know that stories are much more salient, they're much more sticky if you allow someone to make the last leap in the story. If you tell someone how they should feel, like coal mining is bad, these people have lost their homes, this environment is being destroyed, you should feel bad about it, that is less likely to stick than

Tom Trevatt (35:12)

Okay.

Mm -hmm.

Neal (35:29)

if you show them what's happening and show them that people are feeling pain, that systems are damaged, and let the person make the leap themselves. You might not get everybody making that leap, but that leap will stick more with the people for whom it's been made.

Tom Trevatt (35:48)

This is really true. And I see so much communication, let's say, you know, well -meaning progressive, perhaps even left -wing political communication that is essentially that first form of storytelling, which is, this is how it is, this is how you should feel, you should feel like this. It doesn't allow any kind of space within the story to kind of create that sort of part of you that needs to be in that, that you need to then be able to kind of put yourself in there to create that final little bit. I think this is what is beautiful about imagery actually, that actually images, films, well put together series of images or films and so forth, actually do, like you say, create that space for the audience to fill in those gaps or to kind of complete the work as it were.

Marcel Duchamp called it refining sugar from molasses. So was that the way around? Something like that. But basically the creative act of viewing a piece of art is like refining sugar. It's like creating that kind of final little bit from taking the kind of raw materials and creating something that's kind of edible, which I've always kind of, I've always thought of as being absolutely vital to any kind of art practice and also storytelling and creative sort of let's say photographic or image making practice. Let's talk just a little bit about practice. We are coming to the end of our lovely conversation. So I do want to talk a little bit more about images and practice. You have talked about what you've been documenting and photographing, but you haven't really talked about the photographs themselves or the films that you're making. So can you, I mean, we will link your website below and we will obviously link your Instagrams and all that kind of stuff, but you know, talk us through the things and the ways and the processes that you've been going through to create the images that you've been making and what they look like.

Neal (37:57)

Yeah. So I use a lot of drone photography. And the reason that I do that is primarily because I feel quite passionately about something that I'll call democratizing the aerial view. So seeing things from above has historically been an imperial, imperialistic or military restricted gaze. So

Seeing things from above is often associated with satellites or military drones. And for me, the advent of commercially available, affordable drones gives us as image makers and public this ability to see what's behind the hedge. And I am fascinated by, as an environmentalist, what we can't see. And I've lived...

my entire life until I was 18 in a town called Shrewsbury right next to a really big mine. And I had no idea it was there until maybe a year ago, because you can't see it. And as soon as you... I was actually taking a picture of my parents' church for them by drone, and I just turned it around and saw this massive hole in the ground. And it's undoubtedly grown since I was a child, which is eons ago. But

Tom Trevatt (39:24)

Yeah.

Neal (39:27)

That just really struck me that there's so much that we can't see from the ground and so much that is hidden from us somewhat deliberately. So my main practice is about a different perspective and trying to show systems that we might be really close to that we might have seen from the ground, but that we would appreciate differently if we saw it from above.

And I mean, that work really has been pioneered by Edward Botinsky. He's been using drones recently, but he flew around on a helicopter, taking pictures from above for a really long time. And his images are beautiful. They're also about $38 ,000 Canadian dollars if you want to see one of them. And he's got an exhibition at the Satchi at the moment, which is not free, but I'm really interested in this democratizing the skies. And because I'm interested in environmental stuff, that's sort of from a subject perspective, quite relevant. And the other side of my practice, just regular camera work is, I guess, influenced by my interest in trying to capture emotions, whether they are mine or the people that I'm photographing. I think more commonly it's mine.

Tom Trevatt (40:48)

Mm -hmm.

Neal (40:54)

I'm a very emotional person. So when I see something that I feel I want to portray in an image, I feel very motivated to capture it. I worked as a wedding photographer for a while. So that documentary style in weddings, I think worked well for a little while, although I didn't enjoy it very much. So I think that's what I tried to come through, what I tried to show in my practice. I mean, last summer my master's thesis was a project purely photographing trees. And that was a very deep emotional connection that I had with the tree that I was photographing at the time. It's hard to say that with a serious face, but it really, it was trying to capture an emotion that I had and it was a very personal project. And it doesn't convey meaning and emotion as easily as portrait photography does, but they're very different styles. So I think.

Yeah, my practices sort of revolve around trying to show things that people might be really familiar with, but from a different perspective. And then, yeah, I guess to try to convey the kinds of emotions that I feel when I am shocked or appalled or awed by the impact of our society.

Tom Trevatt (41:57)

Mm -hmm.

You mentioned beauty. You mentioned this photographer's work. I can't remember his name, but you mentioned beauty and I've looked at your work, obviously, and you know, some of it is very beautiful, especially that those photographs of like polluted rivers with like bright green or bright blue pollution or whatever, you know, kind of running through. And I've seen obviously, you know, those sorts of drone shots or helicopter shots before where it's like the most awful thing that's happened to the planet is the most beautiful thing. You know, like oil slicks are sometimes so incredibly beautiful in the sort of purely aesthetic sense. I want to ask about beauty because obviously beauty is absolutely integral to photography. And it is part of a kind of long history of, let's say, landscape painting and photography. You know, we look at landscapes in order to create them in our minds as beautiful images that we can either be awed by or feel kind of some form of Kantian sublime experience by looking at them, right? The sort of man on the edge of a mountain kind of painting. And precisely we do this because we are the subject - looking at an object, we are the subject in the world. There's that kind of division between us as humans and the world that we're looking at. And it's framed, you know, in order to be able to see it more clearly. We often don't find landscapes beautiful until we frame them precisely because we need to kind of create them as culture, right? We need to have that kind of little moment where it's like, okay, so, here I am in the middle of a landscape and let's take a photograph of it to create it as culture to be able to make it kind of legible as a kind of beautiful object. And I do wonder because some of my research actually looks at this kind of culture, nature divide and kind of what it means to say some things on the side of culture and some things on the side of nature. Precisely in a way like looking at a work of art, looking at a photograph of landscape is a way to kind of reinforce that culture, nature divide precisely because it says, here I am as a subject in a kind of inert world, i .e. the natural world. And I am able to take a photograph. I precisely take, extract, pull out a photograph from this inert world. And I do kind of have this little battle in me about this because it's like, there is a kind of level of extraction that needs to happen in order for that photograph to be pulled out of either a landscape or a person, which does create this sort of odd division, this kind of little division, a kind of constant contradiction that we're playing with when we're either trying to photograph people or as you are trying to photograph landscapes, precisely because maybe the message, maybe the message shouldn't be we are distinct from nature, but actually precisely we are nature. And that for me makes it quite a complex problem to be wrestling with. And one that I think a lot of landscape photographers do wrestle with, especially if they have got the same concerns as you.

Neal (45:40)

Yeah, really good point. I was nodding and raising my eyebrows at various points in there because although you will see a couple of landscapes on my Instagram, I don't take landscapes. That was purely an educational practice really, but it's not something that I do. I do not like making images of landscapes for exactly that reason that it does feel extractive. So the majority of my work is around documenting abuse of nature. And I do, I mean, I think all of us who have camera phones feel, maybe we don't feel, but maybe subconsciously we would if we thought about it make images extractively. So we are trying to capture the moment. And so when I go hiking in the mountains, I don't take my camera deliberately unless I'm practicing with my drone. But I don't because this concept of the sublime is something that I'm not interested in trying to recreate, not the beautiful sublime, partly because I don't think it exists anymore. I don't think there's any part of the world that is not being so substantially altered by humans that something in the image would make me feel sad. I mean, you mentioned landscape painters. A lot of the British landscape painters from the 18th century would paint environments that I would class as degraded.

And when I see them, they don't look beautiful to me. I can appreciate the technicality of the image. And the same with photography. I can appreciate the technicality of landscape images, but I find a lot of landscape images and a lot of wildlife photography personally politically offensive because of what they are trying to do. And because of the damage that they don't realize they are portraying, being that close to an animal, being able to be in a country where you can photograph that animal.

Or unintentionally photographing a system that has been heavily degraded that culturally we now appreciate. So I think I agree with you in terms of the futility of the attempts to photograph the sublime. Interestingly, what Edward Botinsky refers to, it's been coined as a phrase by someone else, is the industrial sublime. So when he was working earlier on, he was claiming that his images were showing the power of human ingenuity be able to produce damage on such a huge scale, which is why I have a problem with his work and his opportunity that's been missed to have an impact on changing behaviors and changing attitudes towards the scale of destruction. Yeah, so I'm not really... I'm going to say this and I think I'm probably going to regret saying it, but I'm not really interested in beauty. That doesn't cross my mind when I'm making images. My approach to photography is more about emotion and evidence, which possibly why I'm not a very successful photographer, but I, yeah, I'm not, I'm not particularly interested in, in classical definitions of beauty in the sublime. I'm interested in conveying an emotion which to me is beautiful. So I guess maybe I am interested in beauty, but my definition of beauty is probably very different from a classical photographer.

Tom Trevatt (49:36)

Yeah.

I think, oh, it's gone. Oh, I was going to say, I think this is interesting because I think that actually like, there could be a mechanism by which you could exploit something like beauty. Like you could say, okay, so I'm not interested in beauty for beauty's sake. I'm not interested in kind of, you know, the Kantian side of this, but more in the sense that you're like, okay, I want to, I want to utilize beauty in order to produce these stories.

Neal (49:41)

No, no, that's it.

Tom Trevatt (50:09)

that you were talking about to produce political change. So beauty could be a tool in that toolkit. The other thing is, oh, gone, gone.

Neal (50:15)

think that's a really interesting point because it's just saying that. My stomach is contracting. I think the reason is it feels immoral to use beauty to catch people's attention because the vast majority of people will focus on the beauty and ignore the message. I can imagine

Tom Trevatt (50:22)

Ah, good.

Neal (50:45)

taking a really beautiful photograph of a very degraded landscape and that winning competitions because it's very beautiful. And it's winning because of the abstract, decontextualized beauty alone and not the message behind it. And that's maybe somewhat of a mute point because it depends on the observer. But the way that I use my images, the

Tom Trevatt (50:54)

course.

Neal (51:11)

places that I put my images and the messages in which those images are packaged is more important than the image for me because the image on its own, it feels manipulative if it were to get attention purely on its aesthetic beauty. And it's a debate that I know a lot of photographers have. But yeah.

Tom Trevatt (51:36)

We will wrap up very, very soon. Um, but this, I think this is actually kind of like at the heart of the problem really is, is the, you know, this, this, this particular question, uh, that we've been kind of wrestling with is, it feels like it's the heart of the problem because it's also the pro it's also the heart of the problem of something like, um, international aid, right. It's like, how do you motivate people to go to parts of the world to help people, if what they're getting out of that is not a sense of satisfaction, right? And being satisfied is a little bit like viewing beauty, right? And the international aid community essentially exploits that idea of like a white Western satisfaction in themselves to go to a part of the world that they see as in need of help. So there's that kind of, that's that sort of constant like,

Neal (52:34)

That's interesting.

Tom Trevatt (52:35)

fight tied up in there. One thing I just wanted to say about the sublime is that this idea of the industrial sublime, I think is really interesting, because we might think of as I have in sort some of my past research, think of something like the anthropological sublime, the idea that sorry, not the, what was it?

Neal (52:37)

Yeah.

Tom Trevatt (53:06)

No, we might, we might, sorry, we might think of, we might think of, of, of, of this as like an inform of the environmental sublime, let's say, um, the idea of, uh, there being this kind of capacity to see all this, all this, this moment of seeing, uh, an extreme, uh, form of crisis and extreme sort of, sort of, uh, slow violence as Rob Nixon calls it. It's kind of like unfolding of like of destruction over a very, very large scale. And that experience is one of seeing the sublime, that we see this kind of, you know, the huge death tolls that are to come or are in the process of happening. The huge, the massive changes to our ecological, you know, the life worlds that we live in, the absolute enormous numbers that we keep reading about, you know, whatever those numbers might be. That experience is one of being faced with the sublime. And the sublime precisely is actually, it's not, the sublime really is important, it's a really important point, right? The sublime is not an experience of like something that's outside of us as being something like super scary, right? That's horror. The sublime is the experience of seeing something super scary or super awesome in the true sense of the word, but being safe, being within one's own kind of safety. So you could imagine that a sailor at sea, seeing a massive wave from the safety of a perfectly fine, sturdy ship is seeing the sublime of the ocean. But a sailor on the same sea on a ship that's falling apart, that's not sublime. It's very much not the same experience, although it's the same wave and it's the same view, right? One safe, i .e. they're seeing the sublime and one's not safe. And it's precisely, it's the kind of frame, the frame of the picture, the frame of culture, the frame of industry, the frame of human endeavor that creates that kind of experience of the outside world precisely as one of a sublime experience.

Neal (55:20)

That's really interesting. It reflects what you were saying earlier about that humans are part of nature. It's not so much safety, it's perception. Well, it's not at all safety, it's perceived safety because we are all on a boat that is heading into an enormous storm and we are going to sink. How quickly we sink and how far our boat sinks before we can get off it and try and find some scraps to hang onto depends on how much we take action. But it's interesting because we can look at a landscape and think, gosh, this is really beautiful and be in the face of sublime and feel a sublime experience and not realize that that in fact is a departing, dying system. So that feeling is artificial. It's based on our cultural perception of what we're seeing. And our experiences of the sublime now would be quite different from people who were living in nature and experiencing that every day thousands of years ago. So yeah, I think for me, it highlights that it's a very cultural specific and personal experience as well, whether you see it as the sublime or not, but it does.

Tom Trevatt (56:26)

Mm -hmm.

Neal (56:52)

It does highlight the importance of language because the word awesome is not a good word. You are full of awe, and awe is a sort shocking respect, a shocking experience to have. And it's the same etymology as awful, full of awe. But awful is a bad word and awesome is a good one. And think it, I mean, linguistics is fascinating because it sounds very nerdy, but it also gets to the root of

Tom Trevatt (57:14)

Mm -hmm.

Neal (57:22)

how we connect with things as a culture. Yeah, and I mean, that was what my project over the summer was connecting with linguistics.

Tom Trevatt (57:31)

Neal, where can people find you on the internet?

Neal (57:40)

I exist in many places on the internet. My website is www .nealhadoway .com. I'm on Instagram, Neal Haddaway, and Neilhadoway .photography. And if you go to linktree .ee, linktree slash Neal Haddaway, you can find links to my research work as well.

Tom Trevatt (57:53)

fantastic.

amazing. We'll put all of those in the thing in the show notes so that people can click through and check your workouts and so forth. But honestly, Neal, it's been an absolutely amazing conversation. Thank you so much for joining us today. See you very soon.

Neal (58:19)

Thanks very much, the pleasure's been all mine. See you soon.

Tom Trevatt (58:23)

Cheers.