Hope and Reverance: The Right to Remain
Cristina Mittermeier + Paul Nicklen
To remain is never simply to stay. It can be an act of endurance, a claim to place, a refusal of erasure. In the photographs of Cristina Mittermeier and Paul Nicklen, remaining becomes a question of rights and power: who is permitted to remain, under what conditions, and who assumes the authority to decide?
Both artists have spent decades working in environments transformed by climate change, extractive economies, pollution, and other forms of human intervention. Yet their work reaches beyond conservation photography. Nicklen often approaches these pressures through wildlife and habitat; Mittermeier through Indigenous communities whose cultural survival is inseparable from the lands and waters they inhabit. Seen together, their photographs reveal environmental and social justice not as separate concerns, but as parts of the same system.
Nicklen’s animals are not simply objects of wonder. They inhabit territories increasingly altered by forces beyond their control. His photographs ask whether survival is enough, or whether other species possess something closer to a right to habitat: a right to continue inhabiting the environments from which they evolved.
Mittermeier’s work extends the question directly into human experience. Her photographs of Indigenous communities consider land and water not simply as resources, but as sources of identity, memory, knowledge, livelihood, and sovereignty. When access to those places is compromised, what is threatened is not only survival, but continuity itself.
Her newest collage works deepen this inquiry. By incorporating documents associated with identity, citizenship, migration, and personal history, Mittermeier turns attention toward the systems through which institutions determine who belongs, who may cross a border, who may stay, and whose history is officially recognized. Fragmented and reconstructed, these documents expose the instability of the very structures that claim the authority to define belonging.
This is where The Right to Remain becomes more than an environmental proposition. Who has the right to remain on ancestral land when economic or environmental pressures make remaining increasingly difficult? What rights do animals possess when human activity transforms the conditions necessary for their survival? Who determines which communities, species, cultures, or landscapes are protected—and which are considered expendable?
The beauty of these photographs matters, but beauty is not their conclusion. It draws the viewer toward subjects whose circumstances demand a more difficult kind of attention. Photography becomes not simply a means of recording what exists, but of confronting us with what may disappear, what is being displaced, and what is struggling to endure.
Mittermeier and Nicklen ultimately challenge the idea that environmental crisis happens somewhere else—to distant oceans, remote communities, disappearing ice, or unfamiliar species. Their work reveals a world in which ecological degradation, cultural displacement, inequality, and the loss of habitat are deeply interconnected.
The Right to Remain asks us to consider what it means to belong to a place, what it means to lose that place, and whether the power to determine who or what may remain should ever have belonged to us
in the first place.
essaay by Bruce Halpryn, curator
