Visual narratives of environmental change: collective memory and identity at New Zealand heritage sites

Abstract

This article interrogates historical photographs exhibited at public heritage sites in Aotearoa New Zealand. The analysis reveals that – by portraying 19th-century environmental change as a ‘heroic’ narrative of ‘progress’ – the photographs construct New Zealand national identity in opposition to nature, rather than promote a sense of connectedness with the natural environment. The article thus makes three important contributions to the literature on the visualization of environmental and climate change. First, the empirical case study demonstrates that visual narratives shape our social identities in relation to nature. Second, the article adds a rare socio-semiotic analysis to the environmental communication literature, highlighting that photographs have to be examined through multimodal methods and in relation to wider discursive processes of meaning making. Third, by borrowing ideas from the literature on collective memory, the article shows that, even though they depict scenes that are set in the distant past, historical photographs can still influence environmental attitudes and behaviours in the present.