Subhankar Banerjee is an internationally known writer, environmental activist and scholar. He is also an extraordinary photographer and has said that photography, for him, is a portal to activism and knowledge. Several of his large-scale photographs of Arctic Alaska are now on display in Long Environmentalism in the Near North, Subhankar Banerjee: Activism – Photographs – Writing at the UNM Art Museum in Albuquerque.
Banerjee heads the Land Arts of the American West program at UNM, where he also teaches art and ecology. "Art for me and activism for me got enmeshed very early in my life," he says. "Art has a strong role to play in helping us change direction, in helping us to understand and then take action."
In this longer version of the interview, Professor Banerjee talks specifically about two of the photographs in the UNM exhibit, "Caribou Tracks on Coal Seams II" and "Known and Unknown Tracks," and he discusses the surprising relationship in the exhibit between its photographs and its wall text.
