This post introduces Subhankar Banerjee and Finis Dunaway’s recently published Environmental History article, “Beyond Fortress Conservation: Postcards of Biodiversity and Justice.”

Imagine this. You’ve been invited to attend a formal dinner at the White House in Washington, DC. You show up wearing flip flops, beach shorts, and a tank top. Many would consider your outfit to be inappropriate, even blasphemous. Now consider the world of art. Collectively, the Venice Biennale art exhibitions represent one of the largest international gatherings of contemporary art, with a long, distinguished history dating back to 1895. Participating in a Venice Biennale exhibition with a stack of postcards is like showing up at a White House dinner wearing beach attire. 

Famous artists do sometimes use postcards as source materials to inform their work, as did the African American artist Simone Leigh who represented the United States in the 2022 Venice Biennale. But postcards, on their own, are rarely presented as “real art” in a hallowed exhibition space.

So why then, in the spring of 2022, did we arrive in Venice with a stack of postcards to display in the exhibition Personal Structures?

We wanted to use this popular visual form to reflect on the global legacies of fortress conservation. In 1872, one hundred and fifty years before, the United States established Yellowstone National Park. Widely celebrated as the world’s first national park, Yellowstone also marked the birth of fortress conservation—a colonial model that dispossessed Indigenous peoples and that still influences biodiversity and protected land policies around the world today.

Widely celebrated as the world’s first national park, Yellowstone also marked the birth of fortress conservation—a colonial model that dispossessed Indigenous peoples and that still influences biodiversity and protected land policies around the world today.

While postcards and other popular images may seem like nothing more than pretty pictures of nature, they perform powerful cultural and political work. Just as fortress conservation created a sharp divide between wilderness and human society, visual images—historically and today—traffic in tropes of untouched nature to disavow Indigenous presence and to marginalize other ways of protecting nature. In such portrayals, the harsh realities of colonial violence and human rights violations remain hidden from view. In the exhibit’s wall text, we emphasized how visual culture weaponizes aesthetics to naturalize fortress conservation.

Yet we also believe that critique is not enough. Our postcards feature photographs—all made in the 21^st century—from three geographic areas: the US West, the transnational Arctic, and tropical India. These images highlight surprising, contemporary examples of biodiversity protection that depart from the fortress conservation model.

One postcard, for example, shows a road sign along a highway in the Western Ghats region of India. The most striking aspect of the bilingual Tamil-English sign is the assertion: “Elephants Have Right of Way.” On the backside of the postcard, we point out how the sign offers clues—including its depiction of a popular Hindu symbol—that explain why drivers are encouraged to slow down and give elephants the right of way.

This image also challenges the arrogant assumptions embedded in fortress conservation, efforts that often presume to bring enlightened attitudes to places bereft of ecological understanding. Here, in what might have been nothing but a prosaic road sign, we see the representation of deep-seated cultural beliefs calling for elephant protection.  This postcard suggests the need to look at more than just iconic images. By engaging with visual culture from below, we can find vistas beyond fortress conservation.

In designing the cards, we took liberty with the familiar divided-back format of postcards—which allows space for both a note and the recipient’s address—by adding an extra column to place extended captions describing the location and the biodiversity and justice issues at stake. Because postcards are an inherently participatory medium, we encouraged visitors to write messages on the back and then return the cards to the display shelves.

Visitors encountered the postcards in a corner room of the Palazzo Bembo, overlooking the Grand Canal in Venice. Our exhibit represented a small part of a larger project, “a Library, a Classroom, and the World,” featuring collaborative work produced by a diverse team of artists and scholars. Given all the artwork on display in Venice during the Biennale, we had no idea whether visitors would stop and pick up our postcards to see and read, let alone take the time to write notes on the back. When the exhibit closed, we were heartened to find messages left in more than fifteen languages.

For our Environmental History article, we included a selection of postcards—9 of the 22 that were displayed at Personal Structures, including examples from the Sakha Republic (Russia); Yukon (Canada); Tamil Nadu and West Bengal (India); and Alaska and New Mexico (USA). Above, we share one postcard (both front and back) from the Venice exhibit not featured in the article. This postcard uses the visual strategy of overlay—combining two separate photos to create a composite image—an approach we employed in several cards. In the article, we link the postcards to broad narratives of visual culture and environmental history, and through unexpected juxtapositions, indicate surprising connections across vast distances.

In the article, we link the postcards to broad narratives of visual culture and environmental history, and through unexpected juxtapositions, indicate surprising connections across vast distances.

In the years ahead, we plan to expand on the Venice exhibit and the Environmental History article by tracing the role of images in the making of global conservation policy. We will research historic images—including postcards, posters, and films—to explain how they have promoted colonial visions of nature. We will also look beyond iconic scenes to illuminate rights and justice-based approaches to conservation. Through a book and an exhibition, we hope to show why visual culture matters to environmental history and how art can engage with pressing issues of biodiversity and justice.

Feature Image: Nikolayev Matvey herding reindeer, Verkhoyansk Range, Sakha Republic, Russia, 2007. Photo Credit: Subhankar Banerjee. This photograph appeared on the postcard, Sustenance from Nature: violence and cultural survival, in Beyond Forest Conservation: Postcards of Biodiversity and Justice, 2022. 

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Subhankar Banerjee and Finis Dunaway

SUBHANKAR BANERJEE is Lannan Foundation Endowed Chair and Professor of Art and Ecology at the University of New Mexico, where he serves as the founding director of the Center for Environmental Arts and Humanities. He co-curated “a Library, a Classroom, and the World” for the 2022 Venice Biennale art exhibition Personal Structures, which received the ECC Award for University and Research Project, and is the co-editor of The Routledge Companion to Contemporary Art, Visual Culture, and Climate Change. FINIS DUNAWAY is professor of history at Trent University. He is the author, most recently, of Defending the Arctic Refuge: A Photographer, an Indigenous Nation, and a Fight for Environmental Justice (2021), which received book awards from the Association for Literature, Environment, and Culture in Canada, the Western History Association, and the Western Writers of America. He has also developed a public history website companion to the book: defendingthearcticrefuge.com.

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