San Francisco Chronicle

Photograph­y aims to change the climate

Documentar­y project sees China and U.S. as holding the key to future

- By Sam Whiting

After a 12-hour flight followed by a two-day drive, Orville Schell stood in the Shanxi province of northwest China and looked out at a view that ruined his family vacation.

“Coal is at the heart of the problem,” he said to himself at the time, and he was still saying it long after he’d returned to his job as dean of the Graduate School of Journalism at UC Berkeley. Unable to shake the vision of “utter desecratio­n that coal mining has caused,” he walked down the hall to the office of famed documentar­y photograph­er Susan Meiselas, whom he had hired as a guest lecturer.

“Let’s go to China,” he said. “Let’s see what we can find by way of photograph­y that documents the cause of this problem.”

That was the start of “Coal + Ice,” an immersive and overpoweri­ng documentar­y photograph­y and video exhibition that has been around the world en route to its American premiere Wednesday, Sept. 5, at the Festival Pavilion at Fort Mason Center for Arts & Culture.

With a budget of $3 million raised through ongoing fundraiser­s, “Coal + Ice” comes with its own Climate Festival offering three weeks of lectures, music, food and educationa­l programmin­g, most of it in a temporary theater built inside the pavilion.

It is timed to the San Francisco Green Film Festival at Cowell Theatre in an adjacent pier and a program of climate-inspired classical music at the San Francisco Symphony. It is also folded around the Global Climate Action Summit, a threeday think tank spearheade­d by Gov. Jerry Brown expected to draw environ-

mental experts and elected officials from around the world to Moscone Center on Wednesday to Friday, Sept. 12 to 14.

With the added overflow from the governor’s summit, “Coal + Ice” organizers expect thousands to attend, including schoolchil­dren on field trips. The exhibit is free and open to the public in the hopes that it gets people to understand and act on the dire emergency wrought by mankind’s constant assault on the environmen­t. There is even a solutions workshop to apply what you have learned, at the end of the exhibit.

“I lament the state of the planet. It’s a mess. And I lament the state of U.S-China relations, which is a mess,” says Schell, 78, who is running “Coal + Ice” through his day job as Director of the Center on U.S.-China Relations, a think tank arm of the Asia Society in New York. “If the U.S. and China can’t get together on climate change, civilizati­on will be a mess. Or end. It’s that simple.”

By the time Schell and Meiselas made that first trip to the coal mines, in 2006, Schell had left the UC Berkeley journalism school, after 10 years as dean, to start the Center on U.S.China Relations. Meiselas — now the subject of “Mediations,” a retrospect­ive at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art — had also left the J-school to return to New York, where she is president of the Magnum Foundation.

In China, she was looking for photograph­s, not taking them, and she and Schell found enough of them to form an exhibit, titled simply “Coal,” which they debuted at FotoFest in Houston in 2008. After that, “it started to grow,” Schell says.

The first direction was up to the Himalayas. Mountainee­r David Breashears told Schell about the disappeari­ng ice fields he had noticed in his five trips to the summit of Mount Everest. Working together, Schell and Breashears tracked down old photos of the Mallory expedition in 1921 and went back to the precise spot where the photograph­er had stood. The glacier had dropped 400 feet. Other glaciers were down to lakes.

From there, the project took off in too many directions to list in the title of the show. “From coal mines to factories to atmosphere to mountains to glaciers to rivers to oceans stirred up by hurricanes,” he says.

“Coal + Ice,” with Schell as executive producer and Meiselas and exhibition designer Jeroen de Vries as co-curators, premiered in Beijing in 2011. It has since toured to Copenhagen, New Delhi, Shanghai, Beijing and Paris.

In San Francisco, “Coal + Ice” has 50,000 feet of exhibition space, on a pier best known for the annual Guardsmen Christmas Tree sale. The windows are covered, and the cavernous hall is as dark as a movie theater. The work of 40 photograph­ers shooting environmen­tal degradatio­n worldwide is visible from all sides and in all sizes, both color and black-and-white. There are no prints; instead, the images are rotating and flicking from suspended movie screens lit up by 42 projectors, three video monitors and a multimedia show on an LED wall toward the back of the pier.

It was scheduled to hit San Francisco in the spring, but was postponed so that Schell could time it to the Global Climate Action Summit, which is co-hosted by Brown.

Schell and Brown’s relationsh­ip goes back more than four decades to when Brown was elected to his first term as governor in the 1970s. Schell wrote a biography called “Brown,” and the two have been close ever since.

When Brown returned to office for his second term, Schell told the governor, “Jerry, you’ve got to pay attention to China,” which Schell points out is the biggest carbon emitter.

“Then the governor got Jesus on climate change,” Schell says.

As part of the summit, Brown is hosting an exclusive dinner for 550, planned by Chez Panisse’s Alice Waters for Sept. 13 at the Festival Pavilion, surrounded by the ongoing imagery of “Coal + Ice.”

For that one night, at least, Schell expects Fort Mason to be the national center for the movement against global warming.

“Trump has taken the United States out of the climate change wager,” Schell says. “So the next best hope for the United States to do something about this problem is California.”

 ?? Liz Hafalia / The Chronicle ?? Ex-journalism school dean Orville Schell is the driving force behind “Coal + Ice.”
Liz Hafalia / The Chronicle Ex-journalism school dean Orville Schell is the driving force behind “Coal + Ice.”
 ?? Liz Hafalia / The Chronicle ?? The U.S. premiere of “Coal + Ice,” at Fort Mason through Sept. 23, was timed to run with next week’s Global Climate Action Summit.
Liz Hafalia / The Chronicle The U.S. premiere of “Coal + Ice,” at Fort Mason through Sept. 23, was timed to run with next week’s Global Climate Action Summit.

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