400 Parts Per Million | reflections on the air we breathe

Created in May 2016 to mark the period when the level of atmospheric carbon dioxide in the Southern Hemisphere surpassed 400 parts per million. In the wake of this news, I created a series of lumen prints on film to record moments of reflection. Each film piece marks a period of time and mindfulness where my own actions contributing to carbon emissions were held in mind and considered against choices that could help reduce my individual impact.

These slow documents don’t reveal any great truth about the threat of anthropogenic climate change or my direct implication therein. Instead, they are symbolic of events moving at a temporal scale beyond easy compression or visual representation. They record a physical exchange between the complex systems of life on earth and remind me that although we are each a small part of this system, our actions are far from insignificant.