Aestheticising Atrocity: George Osodi’s Series Oil Rich Niger Delta

Abstract

ABSTRACT This paper analyses the aestheticisation of environmental disaster in George Osodi’s series of photographs Oil Rich Niger Delta (2003–2007). Depicting the horrific effects of oil drilling in his home country, Osodi chose to make art from real life suffering caused by environmental disaster. Visual analyses of individual photographs reveal carefully chosen compositions and colour selections. Next to building on traditions of art history, Osodi draws on the aesthetics of travel photography. Unlike many National Geographic photographers, such as Steve McCurry, Osodi evades exoticising his subjects by anchoring them in their contemporary environments and providing additional facts. Osodi uses a distinct visual strategy which consists in first drawing the viewer close to his photographs through their beautiful appearance and then revealing their motifs as structural problems of global extent via sequencing and contextualising. His series was not only consumed by the art world, with over 200 photographs shown at documenta 12, but also, due to his profession as photojournalist, in the news. The crossing of categories raises ethical questions related to the medium. This paper argues that the beautified photographs oppose a re-victimisation of their sitters by entering into the civil contract of photography. Highlighting the nature of the atrocity Osodi captured, the limitations of visually representing human rights violations connected to environmental crisis and the photographer’s ways of dealing with them are examined. This paper concludes that Osodi succeeds in visualising the invisibility of environmental crises as a particular form of atrocity through aestheticisation, sequencing, spatiotemporal anchorage and textual framing.