Photography 4 Humanity: A Lens on Climate Justice with Multaka Oxford Youth Culture Club

15/08/2025

As part of the 2025 Right Here, Right Now Global Climate Summit, Fusion Arts presented ‘Photography 4 Humanity: A Lens on Climate Justice with Multaka Oxford Youth Culture Club’. This exhibition brought together powerful global photojournalism with local youth-led creativity to explore climate justice through human experience.

The Photography 4 Humanity Climate Justice Photo Exhibition showcased the human impact of the climate crisis. A partnership between the Photography 4 Humanity prize and the organisation Fotografiska, it was a collection of 31 powerful works by photographers whose works bear witness to the lived experience of environmental devastation. It featured the 2024 Photography 4 Humanity Global Prize winner Viviane Rakotoarivony alongside a carefully selected group of finalists and previous winners. As a collection, these powerful images highlighted the realities that communities on the frontlines of climate change are facing right now.

““Through intimate portraits and striking landscapes, these photographs offer something personal: a glimpse into how climate change touches lives, shifts landscapes, and challenges humans, not in some distant future, but today.””

@fotografiska

Running alongside these international works was a much more local creative response to the climate crisis.

During a 6 week series of workshops coordinated by Hannah Underwood, the community project Multaka Oxford Youth Culture Club–a collaboration between Fusion and Multaka Oxford– worked with artists including Ismael Rodriguez, Fred Branson and photographer Michael Bicarregui to reflect on their own roles in climate justice and respond to the RHRN Summit’s key themes: research, law, rights and movement building. These workshops explored natural materials, recycled art, digital storytelling and photography and resulted in a compelling companion to the global perspective of the Fotografiska-curated exhibition.

Exploring the urgency of the climate crisis through photography, art and place-making, these locally made works were intimate, place and experience-based works that connected the Oxford community to those represented in the exhibition. They were a demonstration of the way young people can act as agents of change and the ways in which art and community can come together to tell powerful narratives on both the global and local scale.

This combined exhibition spoke loudly on the proximity of climate change, providing a range of lenses through which to view it. The range of voices served as a key reminder to the Summit’s message: climate justice is not a distant cause but instead something shared and urgent—right here, right now.