Despite its cheerful swirls of color, the first picture Fair displayed to the audience was actually a close up of sewage from a pig farm.
Fair's work has been published in Vanity Fair, The New York Times and National Geographic, and some of his images are currently on display at the Hood Museum of Art as part of the exhibition "Looking Back at Earth: Contemporary Environmental Photography from the Hood Museum of Art's Collection."
Fair explained how he works with pilots to fly over sites that have experienced significant human impact. Huge industrial machines, such as drill rigs used for hydraulic fracturing or "boggers" machines used to dig for brown coal are as much a part of his photographs as they are a part of the landscape. Fair uses a digital camera, but all of his photographs are unaltered.
His pictures represent a range of subjects and issues. Some of the highlights of the talk included a haunting portrait of a dead pig fetus in a sea of mud, a close up of brightly colored aluminum cans smashed out in the dirt like a mosaic and a pyramid of butter-yellow sulfur infused with a scarlet river of molten sulfur. While the pictures themselves were mesmerizing, the context behind them was even more thought-provoking.
"We don't really think, Turn on the lights and now there's arsenic in the groundwater.'" Fair said.
Although his subject matter was decidedly grim, Fair was an engaging lecturer with a dry, deadpan style of speaking with flashes of dark humor.
Through the course of his lecture, Fair touched on a multitude of topics, ranging from how choosing a different brand of toilet paper can change the world to ways in which the aluminum industry helped contribute to the economic collapse of Iceland in 2008.
"Extractive industries never enrich the places they come from," Fair said. "They enrich Wall Street."
For certain photographs, Fair described the experience involved in taking the image. Most required several passes in a plane to get the perfect shot. Fair's work takes him all over the world, and he has a particularly strong following in Germany.
Fair explained how he raced from work in Europe to Mobile, Ala. to document the 2010 BP oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico. Many of his photos of the disaster focused on the fires that burned night and day in an attempt to clean up the oil.
"You would fly over these things at 1,000 feet and wince because you could feel the heat," Fair said.
His pictures of the BP oil spill showed huge swaths of multicolored oil floating on the blue waters of the Gulf.
"I thought the pictures of the Gulf and the BP oil spill were the most poignant because you saw the ocean and the fire and saw the whole scale of it," Rachel Carter '14, who attended the lecture, said.
Fair also discussed the Athabasca oil sands in Canada and the proliferation of hydraulic fracturing in the northeastern United States harmful environmental practices that have become key political issues.
"How can you photograph global warming?" Fair said. "I mean, here we are in a country that can't even agree if global warming exists or not."
Perception was one of the main themes of Fair's lecture, and he discussed the difference between art, documentation, activism and propaganda.
"It was really interesting to see such an activist approach to photography," lecture attendee Julia McElhinney '14 said.
Fair met with several students for dinner after the lecture.
"He was one of the most radical people I've talked to at Dartmouth in a while, and I found that to be really refreshing," Carter said. "We talked about Greenpeace and activism and what it means to be a considered an activist."
Fair's lecture brought to light the huge scale of environmental destruction at the hands of humankind, though Fair insisted that his message was a positive one.
"My pictures are really about hope," Fair said. "They're not about despair. I want people to come away knowing they can change things."
Although Fair presented many examples of human environmental abuse, most of his proposed solutions involved making responsible consumer choices, which audience members mentioned are not always available to people in lower income brackets.
"I thought he was really powerful, but even though he kept saying that he was hopeful I didn't feel that it was very hopeful," Carter said. "But that's coming from an environmental science background and I know it's not that easy."
Although the nature of his message remained contentious, Fair's photos made a compelling case that changes in both energy production and attitudes toward consumption are necessary to preserve the environment for future generations.
"I think that simply viewing the photographs without hearing him explain them could have been less optimistic, but the context behind them was really inspirational," McElhinney said. "Here was one man going out to risk his life to make art and change the environment."
Fair's lecture was co-sponsored by the environmental studies department and the Hood Museum.
