There’s a grotesque character to the scenes, characters, and gestures Joe Habben captured at Glasgow’s COP26 climate change conference - it’s the shortcomings of a system. We are not only looking at corporate greenwashing: Habben shows us the precision, and the absurdity, of the aesthetics places of power have.

A hashtag: #make our planet great again. A huge, inflatable plastic bear wearing a t-shirt: together is better. An out-of-scale thumb pointing at plastic trees in a model. Huge images of the globe, working as a background for negotiations to take place.

Words by Camilla Maresse as part of an article for PhMuseum.

This is what late-stage capitalism, and environmental injustice look like. Paradoxically, these images can say more about climate change than what a burnt landscape seen from above can do: it’s in places like this one that impactful, large-scale decisions are being taken. The way Habben looks at power creates the premises for us to scrutinize it, reducing the distance with something that often feels out of reach.