Subhankar Banerjee (born 1967) is a photographic artist, educator and activist whose images of the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge and other Alaskan wild lands have captured international attention.
Subhankar Banerjee (born 1967) is a photographic artist, educator and activist whose images of the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge and other Alaskan wild lands have captured international attention.
Born in Berhampore, India, Banerjee received his bachelor's degree in engineering before moving to the United States, where he received master's degrees in physics and computer science. He worked in scientific fields for six years at the Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico and Boeing in Seattle. In 2000, his childhood passion for art, coupled with a deep love and concern for the wilderness and disappearing indigenous cultures, caused him to leave his career in science to pursue art. Since then he has focused all his efforts on indigenous human rights and land conservation issues in the Arctic.
In 2001 Banerjee began the first of two years of ground-breaking year-around field photography in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. The photos he took were published in the book Seasons of Life and Land. [1] Banerjee's photographs of the Refuge were exhibited at the Smithsonian Institution's National Museum of Natural History, and controversy erupted when his captions for the photos were altered and the exhibit was moved to a far corner of the museum. Senator Richard J. Durbin and others in Congress felt that the Smithsonian had been pressured, probably by Alaska Senator Ted Stevens, to remove the exhibit from the spotlight because Senator Barbara Boxer had held up Banerjee's book during a Senate floor debate over oil drilling in the Refuge. The museum maintained the changes were made "for artistic reasons". [2] The attention brought by the controversy led the exhibit to travel to sixteen museums around the United States [3] and since then Banerjee's work has been exhibited in more than fifty museums around the world. [4]
Banerjee's book, Arctic Voices: Resistance at the Tipping Point (Seven Stories Press, Summer 2012), addresses current issues of climate change in the Arctic, resource war, and human rights using first-person narratives from activists, writers, and researchers. [5] The volume is used for teaching environmental humanities [6] and has formed the basis for other projects, such as a 2018 series of haiku poems. [7]
Banerjee has received many awards for his Arctic work including an inaugural Greenleaf Artist Award from the United Nations Environment Programme and an inaugural Cultural Freedom Fellowship from the Lannan Foundation. Banerjee was an artist-in-residence at Dartmouth College and the Sea Change Artist-Activist Resident at the Gaea Foundation in 2009.
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The Arctic National Wildlife Refuge is a national wildlife refuge in northeastern Alaska, United States on traditional Gwich'in lands. It consists of 19,286,722 acres (78,050.59 km2) in the Alaska North Slope region. It is the largest national wildlife refuge in the country, slightly larger than the Yukon Delta National Wildlife Refuge. The refuge is administered from offices in Fairbanks. ANWR includes a large variety of species of plants and animals, such as polar bears, grizzly bears, black bears, moose, caribou, wolves, eagles, lynx, wolverine, marten, beaver and migratory birds, which rely on the refuge.
The National Museum of the American Indian–New York, the George Gustav Heye Center, is a branch of the National Museum of the American Indian at the Alexander Hamilton U.S. Custom House in Manhattan, New York City. The museum is part of the Smithsonian Institution. The center features contemporary and historical exhibits of art and artifacts by and about Native Americans.
Art Wolfe is an American photographer and conservationist, best known for color images of landscapes, wildlife, and native cultures. His photographs document scenes from every continent and hundreds of locations, and have been noted by environmental advocacy groups for their "stunning" visual impact.
The Alaska Wilderness League (AWL) is a nonprofit organization that works to protect Alaska's most significant wild lands from oil and gas drilling and from other industrial threats. Founded in 1993, AWL has its main office in Washington, DC, with additional offices in Anchorage and Juneau, Alaska.
Nick Brandt is an English photographer. Brandt's work generally focuses on the rapidly disappearing natural world, as a result of environmental destruction, climate change and humans' actions.
Cristián Samper is a Colombian-American tropical biologist specializing in conservation biology and environmental policy. He is the Managing Director and Leader of Nature Solutions at the Bezos Earth Fund. He served as President and CEO of WCS from 2012 to 2022. He was the Director of the Smithsonian Institution's National Museum of Natural History, the world's largest natural history collection, from 2003 to 2012, and served as acting Secretary of the Smithsonian from 2007 to 2008, the first Latin American to hold the position. In April 2015, Dr. Samper was inducted into the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.
Braided River is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit publishing imprint of The Mountaineers Books based in Seattle, Washington. Braided River produces large-format photography books that address critical threats to wilderness. In addition to publishing works, Braided River collaborates with partner organizations to develop exhibits intended to reach diverse audiences.
Photography by indigenous peoples of the Americas is an art form that began in the late 19th century and has expanded in the 21st century, including digital photography, underwater photography, and a wide range of alternative processes. Indigenous peoples of the Americas have used photography as a means of expressing their lives and communities from their own perspectives. Native photography stands in contrast to the ubiquitous photography of indigenous peoples by non-natives, which has often been criticized as being staged, exoticized, and romanticized.
Roland L. Freeman is a photographer and award-winning documenter of Southern folk culture and African-American quilters. He is the president of The Group for Cultural Documentation based in Washington, D.C.
Andrea Bowers is a Los Angeles-based American artist working in a variety of media including video, drawing, and installation. Her work has been exhibited around the world, including museums and galleries in Germany, Greece, and Tokyo. Her work was included in the 2004 Whitney Biennial and 2008 California Biennial. She is on the graduate faculty at Otis College of Art and Design.
Kapulani Landgraf is a Kanaka Maoli artist who is best known for her work in black-and-white photography. Through a series of photographic essays, objects, and installations, Landgraf celebrates Native Hawaiian culture while also addressing the legacies of colonialism and its impact on indigenous Hawaiian rights, value and history. While her work often centers on the negative impacts of land use and development, she also alludes to the resilience of the land and the indigenous population. Landgraf says about her work, "Although much of my work laments the violations on the Hawaiian people, land and natural resources, it also offers hope with allusions to the strength and resilience of Hawaiian land and its people.” Landgraf's most recent work combines photographic series with objects and installations.
Lisa E. Bloom is an American cultural critic, educator and feminist art historian specializing in polar studies, contemporary art, environmental art, history of photography, visual culture and film studies and is known for her books and essay contributions to these areas.
Jolene Rickard, born 1956, citizen of the Tuscarora nation, Turtle clan, is an artist, curator and visual historian at Cornell University, specializing in indigenous peoples issues. Rickard co-curated two of the four permanent exhibitions for the Smithsonian’s National Museum of the American Indian.
Kenneth Randall Light is an American social documentary photographer based in the San Francisco Bay Area. He is the author of twelve monographs, including Midnight La Frontera, What'sGoing On? 1969-1974,Delta Time, TexasDeath Row and, most recently, Course of the Empire, published by Steidl. He wrote Witness in our Time: Working Lives of Documentary Photographers, a collection of recollections and interviews with 29 of the world's most well-known photographers, editors and curators of the genre. He has had his photographs included as part of photo essays and portfolios in newspapers, magazines and other media, has been exhibited worldwide and is part of museum collections such as SF Museum of Modern Art and International Center of Photography. Light was also a co-founder of Fotovision, the Mother Jones International Fund for Documentary Photography and he is the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship and three National Endowment for the Arts photography fellowships. He is also a professor at the Graduate School of Journalism at UC Berkeley where he holds the Reva and David Logan chair in photojournalism and he is the director of the school's Logan documentary photography gallery.
Diane Tuft is an American photographer focusing on nature and landscape photography, documenting the effects of the environment on the Earth's landscape. She is based in New York City.
Susana Raab is an American fine art and documentary photographer based in Washington, D.C. She was born in Lima, Peru.
Ellen Land-Weber is an American photographer and author.
Roie Galitz is an Israeli photographer, entrepreneur and environmental activist. He is known for his wildlife photographs, some of which have won international awards, especially those taken north of the Arctic Circle. Locally, Galitz founded Israel's largest school of photography, a photography-oriented travel company and the Israel Photography Conference.
Victoria Herrmann is an American polar geographer and climate change communicator. She is the Managing Director of The Arctic Institute, a National Geographic Explorer, and Assistant Research Professor at Georgetown University’s Walsh School of Foreign Service, where her research focuses on Arctic cooperation and politics and climate change adaptation in the US and US Territories.
Quannah Rose Chasinghorse-Potts is an Indigenous American model. She appeared on the 2020 Teen Vogue list of Top 21 under 21.
