New book explores photo tourism in an age of climate change

A new book by Australian photographer and photo tour guide Pearce Leal explores the complex relationship between climate change and photo tourism.

Leal is a regular traveller to South America, the Arctic and Antarctica, and the new book, A Field Guide to Seeing New Land, considers the motivations behind photographers visiting locations undergoing 'traumatic' change.

"The Arctic, the Southern Andes, and the South Pole are widely recognised for the effects that the climate crisis has had on the landscape," Leal writes. "With society becoming more conscious of the impact of climate collapse, large numbers of photo-tourists now flock to these destinations."

 

Faced with increasing numbers of tourists keen to visit these locations before they are gone, Leal turned his lens on the tourists themselves.

"The book attempts to observe what compels the enthusiast photographer to travel to places in traumatic change and how photo-tourists are instructed to take photographs of their temporary surroundings," he says.

Leal works with family-owned photo tour business World Photo Adventures, and captured the images in the book while working with clients over a number of years and during trips escorting photographers in the field.

Work from the series has won prestigious awards including the Perth Centre for Photography’s Contemporary Landscape award 2019, the Centre for Contemporary Photography best self-published book 2018, and has also been included in the Palm photo prize London, The Heavy Collective, Phases magazine and Open published by Bloom.