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Strange Gardens

October 22, 2021 By meerasub Leave a Comment

By Alicja Wróblewska

It was a pleasure to explore Alicja Wróblewska’s art for the latest issue of Virginia Quarterly Review. Here’s how “Strange Gardens: An Effervescent Vision of Plastic’s Impact on the Ocean” begins…

What is beauty for? What is its source? Polish artist Alicja Wróblewska thinks about such things as she fashions fanciful sculptures, snaps photographs, and creates collages both analog and digital to explore the impact of plastics on ocean health. With a background in political science and commercial photography, Wróblewska lives in the tense space between the consumer societies we inhabit and the wreckage they leave behind.

She’s slipped away from work into the sunlight of a Warsaw park to speak to me, her long brown hair lifting in the wind as she walks with her phone, seeking…

Read the rest here.

Filed Under: Anthropocene, climate change, journalism, photography, plastics Tagged With: Art, climate change, ocean, ocean acidification, plastics, pollution, Virginia Quarterly Review

Take Back What the Devil Stole

December 12, 2020 By meerasub Leave a Comment

Life leads you, one thing to another, one project to another, one person to another.

While I was a Knight Science Journalism fellow at MIT in 2016, I took a photography class with B.D. Colen. I was trying to hone a lifelong passion of taking photographs into something more skilled than just setting the aperture. He pushed us to take brazen photos of strangers on the street, and create a 24-hour time capsule of our lives (the only photos we would be able to look at for the rest of our lives when we were shot into space). We had to get dozens of good shots with the restriction that our subject and our own feet could not move at all once planted (thanks, Lauren Whaley!). He had us document the 2016 presidential election as it unfolded, imploded, and he documented me the morning after the election, when we bagged classwork to watch Hillary Clinton’s concession speech (remember those?) during class. [Read more…]

Filed Under: photography Tagged With: Donna Haskins, Knight Science Journalism, MIT, Onaje X. O. Woodbine, photography, religion, video

United in Change

December 16, 2019 By meerasub Leave a Comment

Photo by Meera Subramanian

As a reader I find there are stories that just stick with me; I can’t shake them. But as a journalist, I experience this a thousand-fold. What appears in print can feel like a haiku, with too many interviews and notebook jottings ending up on the cutting room floor. The histories of place I unearthed through research. The letters to the editor in the thin pages of the local newspaper. The anecdotes shared by those who didn’t make it into the piece. The deep story revealed behind and between their words, too big for the bounds of the word-count. 

As I finished up each of the nine pieces that were part of the series Finding Middle Ground series for InsideClimate News that I worked on for most of 2017-18, about perceptions of climate change in conservative parts of the country, I would find filaments linking them with each other that I didn’t have room to explore. I’d get tangled in threads leading to stories I’d reported in other parts of the world, a lament I heard from a peach farmer in Georgia echoing what a rice farmer had said in India. There were strands of sinew between what I learned in the field and what I knew from my own personal life, a peripatetic journey that’s granted me multiple vantage points, making me feel at home both nowhere and everywhere at once. 

Last year I became a contributing editor of Orion magazine, a publication I’ve read for many years, enjoying the lush richness of its pages, the images and poems and book reviews and NO ADS. (Yes, this is a nonprofit endeavor, and, yes, you can support it by subscribing.)  With this piece for Orion, I finally had a chance to reach up for some of those disparate threads that have been floating around in my head since I finished the ICN series and try to weave them into something that made sense. Or, at least, began to make sense. Still, it feels like a haiku. Still, there is so much unsaid at the edges. Because the story of climate change at this moment in time is immense, and shifting. We’re all living this in real-time, the scientists and storytellers and skeptics all. Much of what I found over 18 months of reporting is deeply troubling, the changes underway stirring so much into uncertainty, but I also hold onto the possibility of the disruption as a great opportunity. No rain without thunder and lightning, Frederick Douglass reminded us. And the storm of climate change is here, now. Anything could happen. 

The piece begins…

For the past couple of years, I traveled across my country, falling in love with strangers. I sought them out—farmers, ranchers, fly fishermen, evangelicals— and stepped into their lives, uninvited but nearly always, inexplicably, welcome. I sought some kind of connection, asking them questions few seemed to be asking them, about their lives and what they care about and what they believe in. Who they vote for and why. What they remember from before and what they expect in the future, which to their collective grief are often different things.

Read the rest here.

Filed Under: agriculture, cattle, climate change, drought, InsideClimate News, journalism, North Dakota, photography, travels Tagged With: climate change, conservation, grief, InsideClimate News, journalism, loss, Nature, Orion, photography, politics, pollution environment

life large & small in Sewanee

July 9, 2017 By meerasub 2 Comments

This is my last Sunday in Sewanee. I fell asleep to the deafening sound of cicadas, a thrumming from the upper branches of the trees that surround the house. In spite of stories of escaped convicts, I can’t help but keep the sliding doors open so I can hear the sound. The land is alive with the cacophony. Bring it on. The more there is, the merrier I am. It was the brilliance behind Rachel Carson’s book title. Two words. No rambling subtitle telling all. Just two words, three syllables, that spoke volumes: Silent Spring. Give me noise from the natural world. Remind me, unceasingly, that there is life. Keep the silence at bay.

I’ve just finished reading [Read more…]

Filed Under: just another day, peregrinations, photography, travels Tagged With: Arli Hochschild, hawk, Helen Macdonald, James Agee, mushroom, Sewanee, silence Rachel Carson, South, Tennessee, USA, wildlife

to the Commons & beyond: Women’s March for America

January 22, 2017 By meerasub Leave a Comment

On Friday, Donald J. Trump was sworn into office as America’s 45th president. Websites were wiped clean of mentions of climate change and the country tumbled officially into the realm of #AlternativeFacts. For journalists, and citizens, the operative word going forward is “vigilance.”

On Saturday, upwards of 1.5 million people took to the streets around the country and world in solidarity with Americans who support human rights, equality, science, access to health care, and real facts (over alternative ones).

The Women’s March on Washington had grown into a national and international tidal wave of action. I was in Boston where the Women’s March for America was anticipating a crowd of about 80,000. On the T ride toward the Boston Commons, an ever-growing wave of women (and men) donning pink pussyhats boarded while more rode bikes across the Longfellow Bridge with protest signs lashed to their baskets, and  it began to seem like there might be more in attendance than expected. Many more. Many many more. As Boston Commons filled and cell phone service crashed, there were speeches by Mayor Marty Walsh, Senator Elizabeth Warren, and the Reverend Mariama White-Hammond.

By the time the crowd was to make its one-mile loop for the march, the only possible movement was a slow-mo shuffle. It took hours for everyone to make their way peacefully through the streets. They chanted “This is what democracy looks like!” and sang out Fiona Apple’s “We don’t want you tiny hands anywhere near my underpants!” I saw a little girl belting out “My body! My choice!” and a lone man with a severe face holding a poster: “Trump. Make America Great Again.” Passerbys ignored him.

By this morning, city officials estimated there were at least 125,000 people. [UPDATE: Make that 175,000.]

Inching through the masses, camera in hand, here’s a selection of photos I took during what felt like an historic day:

[envira-gallery id=”3898″]

Filed Under: News, photography Tagged With: Boston, protest, USA, women, Women's March for America

#VQRTrueStory

December 8, 2015 By meerasub Leave a Comment

Ashish Ajuta

Last year, at the Boston University Narrative Arc conference (one of my favorite of these journo gatherings), Jeff Sharlet, Neil Shea & Darcy Courteu sat on a stage in front of a not-so-large audience, talking about an Instagram revolution. They were not looking to share food porn, nor adorable pictures of themselves or their offspring or their feline companions. They were journalists who observe their world, and whose work can sometimes take them to distant worlds (whether Iraq in midday or a New England Dunkin Donuts at 3 am), and they watch with a close eye. They listen with a close ear. But what to do with these stories, how to share the stories of the lives, loves, losses they encountered? Answer: iPhone camera. Visceral quick writing. Way more characters than Twitter allows. All the stuff that doesn’t fit into the story you were sent to get. I was inspired, but not quite to action. Til now. Happy to jump onto Jeff & Neil’s platform and with the help of editor Paul Reyes over at Virginia Quarterly Review (one of my favorite publications: solid, serious and sumptuous all), kick off ‪#‎VQRTrueStory‬.

My week takes you to the cotton fields of Punjab, her hand upon mine. Buries your nose in live soil and let’s you feel the heat of a wood fire, the smoke in your lungs. It sets you at the feet of a girl in Bihar, who is reaching, reaching up.

Here’s the whole series in VQR.

We’re recruiting.

Filed Under: A River Runs Again, elemental india, journalism, photography Tagged With: A River Runs Again, Elemental India, Instagram, photography, Virginia Quarterly Review

toolik-bound

July 24, 2015 By meerasub 2 Comments

2015.07.23Toolik-28

Nope, that wasn’t our helicopter. That would have been too quick. Instead, a fine crew cab pick up truck driven by Ben Tucker of University of Alaska Fairbanks carried us safely north to Toolik Field Station yesterday over the course of about ten hours. [Read more…]

Filed Under: journalism, photography, travels Tagged With: Alaska, MBL, science

getting my bearings straight

July 22, 2015 By meerasub 3 Comments

2015.07.22Fairbanks-6

Strolling through Fairbanks, Alaska is the Chena River, all glassy and glorious beneath a sky miraculously scrubbed of smoke from the fires that clouded it a day before I arrived. A visit to Alaska has been a wish for quite a long time and it’s great to finally be here on my way to Toolik Field Station as a Logan science journalism Arctic fellow with the Marine Biological Lab (MBL).

The first part of the MBL fellowship took place [Read more…]

Filed Under: journalism, photography, travels Tagged With: Alaska, Arctic, MBL, travel

garden city indeed

December 11, 2013 By meerasub

2013.12.08BloreWlks-27

Bengalaru, nestled in the Deccan Plateau in the center of southern India, is known as the Garden City. On Sunday morning, I set aside the work that brings me here, set aside the old name of Bangalore and the new moniker of Garbage City (this IT capital doubled in size in the last ten years, to 8+ million, but never quite got a sanitation system in place. And don’t get me started on the traffic…). Instead, let’s just revel together in the presence of Vijay Thiruvady, who led a group of us on a tour of the Lal Bagh Garden as part of Bangalore Walks. History! Culture! Discovery! Gorgeous, oxygen-producing greenery. I drank and drank of it. [Read more…]

Filed Under: Fulbright, photography, travels Tagged With: india, Lal Bagh Garden, travel

sweeping air

November 27, 2012 By meerasub Leave a Comment

 

I am overly pragmatic. Each day seems so finite, and there is so much work to do. Big work, made out of endless little work. Schools to construct. Minds to make literate. Wells to dig and water to purify. Inoculations to give and hair to braid and food to feed growing bodies. So many streets to sweep and toilets to build.

Instead, it is time for aarti, the Hindu puja taking place this night, and every night, in hundreds of little temples like this one in Varanasi, India. Someone led me here to this place, tucked into the labyrinth of alleyways behind the Manakarnika Ghat, where bodies are burning. On the way, along the other ghats on the water’s edge, we passed a series of Ganga Aartis – floodlights! amplification! – that attract Indian and foreign tourists alike for the full pilgrimage experience. The masses were stacked on the steps that link city to water and packed into handmade wooden boats just offshore, cameras flashing.But the power went out moments after we passed and we found our way by flashlight to the temple building dimly lit with the inverter’s stored energy.

The Hindu priest is kind, allowing my camera and my curious eyes as I witness the rituals I have watched since I was young. Shiva is the focus here, the stone lingam – more breast than phallus – the centerpiece set in a square of silver embedded into the floor like a pious pit. The priest spends more time in careful preparation for the ritual than it will take to enact it, when three other priests join him and, together their hand bells thunder in unison in rhythm to their chants. As a child, the smell of flowers and fire and the hypnotic sound of the chants would transfix me. Now I can appreciate that this ritual incorporates the five elements into one seamless act. Always I have viscerally loved the moment when, at the end, I can place my cupped hands over the heat of the flame and bring them to my face, my eyes closed.

But I have grown old and I think too much….

Read the rest at The Revelaer.

Filed Under: journalism, photography, travels Tagged With: hinduism, india, pollution environment, religion, Revealer, water

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