Laurence Butet-Roch (PhD Environmental Studies) is an environmental media scholar, photographer and writer.
Her doctoral research (2024, York University) considers how to bear witness to environmental harms caused by extractivism without further reinscribing frontline communities and habitats as damaged, unworthy, and thus expendable. Given that the conceptualization, selection, designation, and production of sacrifice zones are a strategy of land dispossession through pollution, there is a pressing need to attend to how these spaces are discursively made and reproduced, using tools such as photography. As these mechanisms come into sharper focus, so does the need to centre representational justice in environmental justice work. Such commitment entails moving away from damage-based reporting to ensure that the communities feel aptly depicted, in all their complexities and richness. Her project is grounded in the Canadian news media coverage of Aamjiwnaang First Nation/Chemical Valley (Southern Ontario) and uses participatory methods to create a layered visual discourse analysis and recommendations.
Laurence’s scholarship draws on her professional experience as a writer and photographer focusing on environmental justice issues. She is currently pursuing her inquiry into the entanglements of the politics of visibility, representational justice and petroculture as a post-doctoral fellow in Art History and Communication Studies at McGill University.
RECENT WORK
The photographic works of Amber Bracken, Stephanie Foden, Alex Jacobs-Blum, and Josée Pedneault, exhibited at the Galerie d’art Louise-et-Reuben Cohen as part of the inaugural Photo East Festival, reflect ways reciprocal relationships with nature are expressed and the worlds they sustain. From learning wonder and restraint while searching for blueberry patches, to living with and in defense of the unique and diverse landscapes that nourish us. From recognizing a river, such as the Mutuhekau Shipu/Magpie River, to have legal personhood, to acknowledging the depth of our connections to the natural realm; how we are of rivers, lands and skies.
(We are) of rivers lands and skies
Curatorial project
Jan. 29, 2025 - Apr. 3. 2025
Galerie d’art Louise-et-Reuben Cohen, Université de Moncton & Photo East Festival
Remediating toxic images: Moving towards representational justice in environmental reporting
Conference presentation
Oct. 24, 2024
Universities Art Association of Canada
Waterloo University
Grounded in research conducted in and with Aamjiwnaang First Nation, this paper advocates for combining two approaches to develop a critical and just eco-photography practice: attunment to haunting and participatory methods of visual discourse analysis, such as elaborated images. The first calls for an affective engagement with photographs that is concerned with identifying depictions that centre liveness—understood as complex, dynamic, and resonant existence—rather than those that merely exposes a life. While the second asks community members to reflect and intervene on photographs. Together these perspectives spur recommendations on how to avoid perpetuating damaged-based and damaging environmental reporting.
Journal article
co-authored with Deanna Del Vecchio
Jul. 28, 2023
Visual Studies
International Visual Sociology Association
Elaborated images as decolonial praxis
Among lens-based artists and educators, the generative potential of annotating photographs, especially in participatory contexts, is commonly understood. Responding to a lack of cohesive labelling and description of these practices in the literature, the authors identify them as elaborated images and categorise how the method operates. Elaborated images unsettle the authoritative perspective of the photographer, since, by layering their reactions directly atop the photograph, participants actively disrupt static notions of meaning. We argue that elaborated images as a visual method can enable researchers to emphasise polyphony, honour refusal, support truth-telling, contribute to the restoration of relationships, and imagine alternative futures. We draw on the participatory art practices of a growing number of social documentary photographers and consider what their approaches could bring to visual research.