94-6 Environmental Visual Story Telling: Facilitating Discourse of Water Issues, Informing Public Policy at an International Level.

Session: Geoscience and Water: How Geoscience Affects Water-Related Public Policy–Past, Present, and Future

Presenting Author:

Author:

Abstract:

Hydrogeologic training and hydro fieldwork experience provide the ability to read earth’s “stories” revealed in inter-bedded rocks, streams, groundwater, fossils and landscapes. In the field, as I collect data, I find stories that inform my photographs. Themes as environmental impact that food production, energy extraction, and sustainability have on lives, are woven into my images, lectures, and papers.

My “3000 Miles of Acid Mine Drainage in My Backyard” images of chemical sludge and polluted water create abstract beauty as irony. As Diane Stoll (Aperture) noted, “Katarin Parizek’s unsettlingly gorgeous close-ups of sludge” are pleasing to the viewer yet also grotesque.

Opening space for reflection, dialogue, conversation, questions and insights, these images critique political climates, question viewers, create dialog and social awareness in exhibitions and gallery settings. 

Used in an applied way, these same images along with water quality and water depth data, are presented at scientific meetings and congresses bringing awareness to environmental and present-day social issues. 

I’ve exhibited at the Summit of the Americas representing Bolivia, worked with the US Embassy, Bolivian Ministry of Culture, National Ballet of Bolivia, tribal elders in the US and Bolivia, Egyptian Ministry of Antiquities, FRONTERA EASTERN in The Republic of Georgia and photographed nuclear impacted-waste lands of Chernobyl for a USAID team.

My images communicate the importance of dewatering projects to non-English speaking Egyptian villagers, trying to protect their homes and survive off their salt-encroached land. Villagers share their problems, allowing me to photograph their mudbrick homes, dying date trees, salty sugar cane fields, showing the destruction created by rising mineralized groundwater. This water-related damage not only impacts villages and farmland, but also permanently destroys ancient antiquities along the entire Egyptian Nile Valley and Delta.

Images are embedded in permission papers, exit reports and white papers, 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, illustrating problems that words cannot describe, revealing the hidden, giving voices to the voiceless villagers, bringing social awareness to problems that need resolution.

Here, images shift from photography as evidence and illustration to photography as social activism. Image making turns into discourse that creates hydrogeologic awareness and informs public policy at an international level.

Geological Society of America Abstracts with Programs. Vol. 57, No. 6, 2025

doi: 10.1130/abs/2025AM-10967

© Copyright 2025 The Geological Society of America (GSA), all rights reserved.