Call them environmental harbingers.
In 1824, French mathematician and physicist Joseph Fourier theorized that certain gasses in the atmosphere created barriers that trapped heat.
In 1856, Eunice Newton Foote, an American amateur scientist and prominent suffragette, tested the heat-trapping abilities of various gas combinations, including mixing air and water vapors with carbon, commonly known as carbon dioxide or CO2, proving that wet air and CO2 were heat-trapping gasses.
In 1896, Swedish scientist Svarte Arrhenius predicted that changes in atmospheric carbon dioxide levels could alter the planet’s surface temperature through the greenhouse effect.
In 2006, former vice president Al Gore released his book (and documentary film) “An Inconvenient Truth,” dismissed by some as “fearmongering” and “globalist agitpop propaganda.”
For years, scientists and environmental activists have sounded the alarm and far too many have continually hit the snooze button, ensconced in the comforts that had always been taken for granted. Meanwhile, roads wash out, fires burn, rivers rise, crops are washed away and homes tumble into the sea.
Since the 1880s, the widespread burning of fossil fuels has sped up climate change. The impacts includes a rise in global temperatures, rising sea levels, Arctic ice thaw, a decrease in badly needed snow cover, ocean acidification, a spread in infectious disease such as cholera, meningitis and malaria, and extreme unprecedented weather conditions across the planet including heatwaves, floods, wildfire, drought, blizzards, and hurricanes.
It is as if the elements themselves are revolting against humanity, punishing mankind as if they were the angry gods of ancient myth. The environment itself appears to be inflicting justice.
Jeffery C. Becton is another harbinger, although he delivers the ominous message in a vastly different fashion, one that is visually engaging and demanding of attention.
His large-scale digitally manipulated photographs are currently on display in the New Bedford Whaling Museum’s Wattles Gallery. And it is a tour de force. Becton, a pioneer in fine art photography, received an MFA from the Yale School of Art in 1976. He lives on Deer Isle, Maine, home of the renowned Haystack Mountain School of Craft.
Just weeks ago, Deer Isle was hammered by a January storm and the community’s causeway was largely destroyed by flooding. It is predicted that it will take years to rebuild. Clearly, Becton has firsthand knowledge of what it means to live in an increasingly fragile environment.
For years, he has been creating foreboding photographic images of the sea, flirting with those brave and foolhardy souls who choose to lie down next to her.
Becton is not a photojournalist. Instead, he utilizes the “realness” of photography as a starting point and takes it somewhere else by layering in unexpected elements. The haunting images are cautionary tales, touched with a surrealist’s sensibility, created to point to the obvious danger while understanding the allure of that danger. He is a dreamscaper.
In “Stage Door,” there is a stark room with dingy white clapboard. There is not a painting or a coat hook or a photograph on the wall. It is devoid of furniture save for an old rickety side table. Nothing is plugged in the two electrical outlets that bookend a curve-topped door, which is open to an impossibly close sea.
The sea taunts the room with its proximity, as if to say: “I could take you out in a second, if I wanted to. Try me.”
“Hallowed Ground” is black-and-white and mysterious, almost eerie. In it is an elegant room, with an upright piano in one corner, and a baritone horn and a bell, such as one might use to summon a servant, atop it. A clawfoot radiator is in the other corner, an illustration of sailing ships above it. There is a photograph of a woman above an ornate fireplace mantle and an elegant antique divan in the center of the room.
After taking that all in, the weirdness makes itself known, as one realizes that the ceiling is non-existent. Distant clouds and gray sky are all that is above.
Things get even stranger in “The Keeper’s House.” At the top of a flight of stairs is a hallway with quaint white wallpaper, printed with blue bucolic illustrations of gnarly trees and women in elaborate dresses and a man serenading them with a lute. There is a model of a sailboat on top of a white bureau.
There is a door open to a bedroom. A curtain dangles over the head of a bed, leaning against the wall. A box spring is askew. There is no mattress, blanket or pillow. And water runs through the room like a river, over stones and into the hall. And this is all happening on the second floor. The keeper of the title is a mystery, although the possibility that it refers to the caretaker of a lighthouse resonates deeply.
“Dry Squall” is a squat and lengthy image of an elegantly appointed room. A long dresser is in front of a pale blue wall. An antique clock, a model of a ship and a hurricane lamp are upon it. An open door reveals a bouquet of flowers.
Three gold framed maritime paintings are hung on the wall, partly obscured by an indoor fog, reminiscent of Stephen King’s “The Mist.” Again, what should be outside has decided to come in.
But out of all the dozens of disturbing and conversely beautiful photographic images in Becton’s exhibition, there is one that is particularly discomforting. It is an interior view of a room in which there is an unmade bed, a paint-splattered work table, a wicker chair with worn cushions, some postcards pinned to the wall and a shelf of books, including “The Encyclopedia of Organic Gardening.”
A gorgeous bluegreen sea is visible through two bare windows and as it rushes through an open door, it has become a destructive and violent torrent from which this humble abode could not possibly recover.
It is called “WTF!” And that is an exclamation that we should all be feeling. The future is here.
“Framing the Domestic Sea: Photographs by Jeffery C. Becton” is on display at the New Bedford Whaling Museum, 18 Johnny Cake Hill, New Bedford until May 5, 2024.
Email Don Wilkinson at dwilkinson@newbedfordlight.org
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