Politics of the turbid image: against underwater fascist visual rhetoric

Abstract

This article examines submerged environments and modes of visual mediation that are used to depict them. Attending to the turbid image as an optical register of complex material and political conditions, the authors challenge the normalization of clarity in underwater imaging and question assumptions of access, legibility and the opacity/transparency binary. Navigating between clear and turbid waters, they draw on feminist, postcolonial and anti-colonial approaches to understand these political ecologies and their mediation as critical sites of intervention. The article examines the depiction of coral environments by Nazi propaganda filmmaker Leni Riefenstahl and naturalist Ernst Haeckel, whose visions inform lineages of ecofascist thinking and the contemporary resurgence of authoritarian environmental imaginaries. Finally, drawing on examples from their own practices and those of allied thinkers and practitioners, the authors attempt to redress these trajectories through anti-fascist submerged practices that foreground the murky, situated entanglements of water against reductive, extractive, totalizing visual regimes.