Environmental Visual Story Telling: Facilitating Discourse that Creates Public Awareness and Potentially Changes Public Policy at an International Level.

Hydrogeologic training and work experiences give me the ability to read earth’s revealing “stories” told in inter-bedded rocks, streams, fossils and landscapes. I look for stories of people in places I have worked allowing those stories to inform my photographs. Themes such as the environmental impact that food production, energy extraction, and sustainability have on peoples’ lives, are woven into my images.

As an artist, I elevate the everyday mundane subject into the sublime. During exposure, I choose what to reveal and conceal when composing an image, bringing awareness of common things often overlooked. In exhibitions, my environmental photographic work opens a space for reflection, dialogue, conversation, questioning and insights.

My “3000 Miles of Acid Mine Drainage in My Backyard” images of chemical sludge and polluted water create abstract beauty as irony. Color, lighting and composition along with important layers of information imbedded in each image, make them so compelling. As Diane Stoll (Aperture) noted, “Katarin Parizek’s unsettlingly gorgeous close-ups of sludge” are pleasing to the viewer yet also grotesque.

Selected in juried exhibitions, shown in gallery settings, and used in an applied way, these images are presented at scientific meetings and congresses directly impacting society by bringing awareness to environmental and social issues. My images critique political climates, question viewers, create dialog and social awareness.  Environmental impact that food production, energy extraction, and sustainability have on peoples’ lives are woven into my photographs.  I worked with the US Embassy, Bolivian Ministry of Culture, National Ballet of Bolivia, tribal elders in the United States and Bolivia, Ministry of Antiquities in Egypt and FRONTERA EASTERN in The Republic of Georgia and served as the official photographer for a six-person USAID team, photographing nuclear impacted-waste lands of Chernobyl.

My images communicate the importance of dewatering projects to non-English speaking Egyptian villagers, who try to protect their homes and survive off their salt-encroached land. Ministers, high official decision makers with money and power who rarely leave Cairo, to travel to isolated villages to see these problems firsthand. The water-related damage is not only impacting villages and farmland, but also permanently destroying ancient antiquities along the entire Egyptian Nile Valley and Delta. Villagers share their problems and allow me to photograph dying date trees, salty sugar cane fields, opening their mudbrick homes showing the destruction created by rising groundwater. These images are embedded in permission papers and reports, used as evidence to visually communicate problems to the Supreme Council of Antiquities. Reports are sent to the Egyptian ministers concerning water resources, housing, drainage, agriculture, and antiquities. These images illustrate problems that words cannot describe. They expose and reveal the hidden, giving voices to the voiceless villagers. Here, my images shift from photography as illustration to photography as social activism. These reports go to decision makers with the ability to fund projects that create change in Egypt. They bring social awareness to problems that need resolution. In this manner, image making turns into discourse that creates awareness and informs public policy at an international level.