Spatial Documentary and Just Remediation in Climate Aesthetics

Thomas Patrick Pringle

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Figure 1: Author’s screenshot of popular video of a man saving a rabbit from a wildfire on Highway 1 near La Conchita, California, 8 Dec. 2017.

Uncertainty: A Problem for Documenting Climate Change

On 8 December 2017, NBC news reported on Oscar Gonzalez’s drive home from work along California’s shorefront Highway 1.[1] Twenty-nine wildfires were burning in the region, forcing major evacuations, power losses, property damage, and dangerous air quality. The Thomas Fire encompassed 218,893 acres, then the largest wildfire in California’s recorded environmental history. As of 2025, it has since become the ninth largest. The Thomas Fire burned until late March. While driving by the flames, Gonzalez claimed he saw a rabbit on the side of the road, decided to pull over, and saved the creature (fig. 1). Recorded from across the highway by unaffiliated observers—LA-based RMG News—the resulting popular video corresponds to the actions described by Gonzalez’s later testimony. Images show a man express visible anguish at a rabbit’s plight, before his silhouette reaches downward to carefully pick up the creature. Against the relief of a wall of flames, the man’s shadow cradles the animal in his arms before wrapping it in his hoodie and carrying it offscreen. The video went viral on Twitter (now X), prompting coverage of the story by many major international news outlets. Several accounts labeled the figure a hero and held up the video as an example of human empathy and hope during dark, climate-changed times.

This story became complicated three days later. A second man, Caleb Wadman, approached NBC to say that he was, in fact, the one responsible for the rabbit rescue.[2] His claim prompted NBC to perform forensic image enhancement of the video before establishing that the video was shot at the location described by Wadman’s verbal account. The video’s spatial reference was corroborative, and NBC published an editorial retraction clarifying the identity of the hero of the story. Meanwhile, Gonzalez submitted the clothing he wore that day as counterevidence, which matched the apparel worn by the figure in the video and presumably smelled of smoke. NBC ultimately relied on reading the image for geographical coordinates to verify its historical reality and establish who was there and who saved the creature, siding with Wadman in the debate.

This case illustrates Hito Steyerl’s argument that “uncertainty” has become the “principle” of modern documentary: “our belief in the truth claims articulated by anyone, let alone the media and their documentary output, is shaken.”[3] Today, documentary is an institution that has been destabilized by the mass commercial dissemination of digital devices that have the ability to produce and share nonfiction images. As desirable as it may be to have this collective ability—to have entire communities generate representations of the changing world before them—Steyerl submits that the proliferation of device-driven imaging and mobile screen-based viewing has altered how publics think about documentary as a social institution: “The only thing we can say for sure about the documentary mode in our times is that we always already doubt if it is true.”[4] Beyond the unsettling of public faith in visible evidence, uncertainty also describes the epistemological difficulties in attributing local biophysical phenomena such as wildfires to the global averages of atmospheric chemistry termed climate change.[5] Noting this symmetry, I hazard that uncertainty is a broader knowledge formation giving shape to both the perception of global heating impacts and the shading of belief in its nonfiction mediation.

The confusion raised by the rabbit video provokes questions about the evidentiary status of handheld, participatory documentary digital video that document climate crises. If something is saved or destroyed—like a rabbit—how does personalized documentary testify to what was there before? Digital records serve as a baseline for how global climate change and entailing ecological crises reorganize matter and life in local parameters; they index the shifting historical and epistemological conditions—uncertainty—that characterize how social expectations of normalcy and causality change on a warming planet.[6] It’s entirely possible that two rabbits were saved and only one filmed in Ventura County that day, yet that same possibility registers a pervasive, and historically specific, sense of doubt tethered to modern documentary and its current manifestation in proliferating new media.

This episode demonstrates how recent documentary audiences expect footage shot on personal devices to work: here, handheld video’s recording of profilmic space operates in an evidentiary mode that faithfully records what happened before the camera by working to preserve a spatial record in anticipation of flames transforming the landscape. Such expectations are social and corral spatial representations into an instrumental signification resembling insurance, providing record in case of loss. They are assumed to operate as empirical data testifying to what existed before the destruction of personal property, life, or landscape. This visual evidence might solicit reimbursement, restoration, humanitarian care, or, as elaborated below, just remediation. For better or worse, documentary images may redevelop what was there before.

Accordingly, the California rabbit footage inspired scholarship on the role played by digital video following climate crises, wherein images and video shared online participate in creating “ties that can be mobilized toward long-term efforts to rebuild the disaster-affected communities.”[7] Our heating world, with multiplying environmental crises, is increasingly rendered visible by documentary media—smartphones, dashcams, doorbell cameras, and so on—that circulate visible evidence through distributional channels including personal computers and cellular networks. Multiplying crises, proliferating devices, and mass visual dissemination pose methodological problems for discerning the apparent uptick in frequency of ecological disasters. It can feel unclear whether climate change or documentary makes the world feel uncertain; environments have never been so comprehensively documented, visible, but also unstable.

[Figure 2: Author’s screenshot of Janet Walker’s map of El Mar La Mar (dir. J.P. Sniadecki, 2017) in “Spatial Documentary Studies, El Mar La Mar, and Elemental Media Remediated,” (2023).]

Spatial Documentary and the Social Ecology of Place

Janet Walker’s research has established the “spatial turn” in documentary studies with the concept of “spatial documentary” describing the geographical dimensions and dimensional depth inherent to a documentary image’s reference to an existing space in time. Through a series of publications appearing between 2009 and 2023, Walker built a critical lexicon for studying how spatial documentary mediates environmental crises.[8] For instance, in “Rights and Returns” (2009), Walker’s analysis centers three films—Spike Lee’s When the Levees Broke (2006), Lessin and Deal’s Trouble the Water (2008), as well as New Orleans for Sale! (2008) by Brandan Odums—to examine the role that documentary images play in recording, extending, and contesting the existing and unequal spatial arrangements that were vividly exacerbated by Hurricane Katrina. The core method offered by spatial documentary is the synthesis of textual analysis with the critique of spatialized epistemology, which together ascertain the role of documentary in co-constituting socially constructed representations of space alongside existing, uneven contours of spatial topography that Walker terms the “social ecology of place.”[9]

Throughout this work, Walker’s analysis approaches documentary media with ambivalence. On the one hand, she isolates how some nonfiction images work to leave extant the structural injustices enflamed during environmental change, as documentary may work to re-entrench unequal geographies. On the other hand, Walker details the spatial coordinates of individual shots, advocating a mode of interpretive criticism that maps how films cross, record, intervene upon, and re-construct space (fig. 2). This style of analysis comprehends how a documentary’s coincidence with space enables sequences and images from nonfiction film to become interpretable guides for communities to act, sometimes despite the film’s negative ideological work. In other words, Walker advocates the interpretation of spatial documentaries as conceptual devices for learning about a specific place’s geography. This approach to film gives access to qualities of place that are critical to understanding the role non-fiction media play in historical and potential transformations of space: “the capacity of documentary film not only to sense and to represent but actually to remap and remake the natural environment.”[10] Building upon this methodological premise is Walker’s commitment to understanding that geographical space is neither fully essentialized nor wholly constructed, but, from Henri Lefebvre, both at once: “landscape as both material in nature and necessarily produced through existing and evolving structures of knowledge and power.”[11] Spatial documentary shows how spaces mapped by documentary turn the art, as well as its criticism, into an active and political negotiation involved in how communities understand place.[12]

For instance, in “Moving Home,” Walker analyzes documentaries about post-Hurricane Katrina New Orleans that focus on gentrification and the narrative of “right of return” promised to displaced community members. She examines Luisa Dantas’ Land of Opportunity (2011), which catalogs the demolition of public housing in the 7th ward, and Walker calls attention to how the social construction of space—New Orleans as a site of redevelopment that consummates the promise of return—is also fraught with violent realities of a structurally and ecologically precarious topography. The city’s low elevation, wetland erosion caused by histories of irresponsible water management including drainage canals maintained by the petroleum industry, as well as looming extreme weather, collectively mark spatial injustices contrapuntal to the celebration of development and reinstatement: “as humans strive to reduce the consequences to people and society of relatively frequent events, they end up increasing vulnerability to major, rare events. . . . The very construction projects undertaken to ensure the safety of residents are actually increasing their vulnerability through a false sense of security.”[13] The best-intentioned remediation may leave in place inequalities that arranged in advance the climate-charged violence of Hurricane Katrina, with recovery extending the social catastrophe that suffuses the city’s spatial organization well beyond the euphemism of “natural disaster”: historical and racialized economic exploitation remain within the long-term planning of so-called “safe development.”[14]

For Walker, in considering this “social ecology” apart from what’s immediately fixable by humanitarian investment, she reads Land of Opportunity for its insistent inclusion of grassroots organizers in post-disaster relief work and economic planning. The multi-platform film thus intervenes in the reconstruction of New Orleans’ civic space through a “(carto)graphic mise-en-scène” that shows communities planning for futures not reducible to rhetorics of tourism-driven development, and contributes to “the verbal, performative, and semiotic insistence, not just on equal right of return for disadvantaged residents but on quality and place of return as well.”[15] Across Walker’s work on spatial documentary, her establishment of methodological tools built to discern in documentary texts how spatial representations—when cameras have “captured a devastated landscape in which everything had shifted”—provide interpretable evidence for mapping and confronting conservative and capitalist social mediations of space being built into futures of recovery.[16] Documentary images are intrinsically spatial and they demonstrate how contradictions of development—e.g. gentrification guised as a right of return—may mask how the dangers and violences extant to communities navigating and inhabiting affected spaces are not recuperated through development. This critical method keeps focus on how documentary might intervene in the social construction of space in manners less tautological and more transformative of social ecology, remediating the “petrified topography” of unequal environments.[17]

Just Remediation: Spatial Documentary and Climate Aesthetics

How can recordings of climate crises become practical objects for intervening in the economic and ecological cycles of extreme weather devastation promised by global heating? In early 2025, the rabbit video from the 2017 Thomas Fire circulated once again in misattribution to the ongoing Southern California fires that killed 30 people and destroyed more than 18,000 structures, prompting fact checking organizations to set the historical record straight.[18] But the visual resonance between depictions of conflagrated suburban space in 2017 and 2025 should give us pause. That Southern Californians might confuse footage from two distinct fires eight years apart testifies to how little social conceptions of flammable space have changed in the interim between disasters. Writing in 1995, Mike Davis argued that expansion of suburban development, and inevitably post-fire redevelopment, in the Los Angeles firebelt would be recurrent due to the “public subsidization” of luxury real estate at the wildland-urban interface.[19] While affluent neighborhoods are largely insured, Davis argued that these cycles would structurally increase the vulnerability of working class and minority communities; the predictable routine of burning homes and suburban recovery in Southern California “is almost never debated in terms of trade-offs or alternatives.”[20] Images of discrete wildfires may bleed together, or become misattributed to separate events, because their reference to real geographies are unmoored by the way that publics become acclimatized in consensual expectation to how those spaces seem fated to burn. In the Los Angeles firebelt, the apparent uniformity of these images is a function of how suburban landscapes are socially constructed as combustible spaces: it matters less whether images of flames can be discerned from each other when publics understand that the space before the camera will inevitably catch fire and be—unequally—set to rights. In response to the potential for devastation and restoration to deepen inequality,[21] how can documentary images that record devasted, shifting landscapes serve purposes beyond the reinstatement of petrified topographies? What would it take for visible evidence to instead argue that a risky social ecology should not be redeveloped towards spatial maintenance of chronic and unjust problems? Spatial documentary criticism clears ground for interpreting non-fiction images to highlight how their frequency and redundancy become groundswell calls for a time ahead when such events are no longer routine and when uneven geographies are transformed.

Notes

[1]Kara Taylor, “Man who saved rabbit from California wildfires explains his decision,” NBC News, 8 Dec. 2017, https://www.nbcnews.com/storyline/western-wildfires/man-who-saves-rabbit-california-wildfires-explains-his-decision-n827741.

[2]NBC Staff, “Man Who Saved Rabbit From Thomas Fire, Captured Hearts Comes Forward,” NBC Los Angeles, 10 Dec. 2017, https://www.nbclosangeles.com/news/national-international/man-who-saved-rabbit-from-thomas-fire-comes-forward/28888/.

[3]Hito Steyerl, “Documentary Uncertainty,” Re-visiones 1, (2011), 3.

[4]Ibid., 1.

[5]Thomas Patrick Pringle, “Documentary: Why is uncertainty useful?” Power Shift: Keywords for a New Politics of Energy, eds. Imre Szeman and Jennifer Wenzel (West Virginia University Press, 2025), 115-8.

[6]Wendy Hui Kyong Chun, “On Hypo-Real Models or Global Climate Change: A Challenge for the Humanities,” Critical Inquiry 41, no. 3 (2015), 675-703.

[7]Shelley Boulianne et al., “Does Compassion Go Viral: Social Media Caring and the Fort McMurray Wildfire,” Information, Communication & Society 21, no. 5 (2018), 708.

[8]See Janet Walker, “Rights and Returns: Perils and Fantasies of Situated Testimony After Katrina,” Documentary Testimonies: Global Archives of Suffering, eds. Bhaskar Sarkar and Janet Walker (Routledge, 2009); Janet Walker, “Moving testimonies and the geography of suffering: Perils and fantasies of belonging after Katrina,” Continuum: Journal of Media & Cultural Studies 24, no. 1 (2010); Janet Walker, “Eavesdropping in The Cove: Interspecies ethics, public and private space, and trauma underwater,” Studies in Documentary Film 7, no. 3 (2013); Janet Walker, “‘Walking through walls’: Documentary Film and Other Technologies of Navigation, Aspiration, and Memory,” Deeper than Oblivion: Trauma and Memory in Israeli Cinema, eds. Raz Yosef and Boaz Hagin (Bloomsbury, 2013); Janet Walker, “Moving Home: Documentary Film and Other Remediations of Post-Katrina New Orleans,” Moving Environments: Affect, Emotion, Ecology, and Film, ed. Alexa Weik von Mossner (Wilfred Laurier University Press, 2014); Janet Walker, “Projecting Sea Level Rise: Documentary Film and Other Geolocative Technologies,” A Companion to Contemporary Documentary Film, eds. Alexandra Juhasz and Alisa Lebow (John Wiley & Sons, 2015); Janet Walker, “Media mapping and oil extraction: A Louisiana story,” NECSUS: European Journal of Media Studies 7, no. 2 (2018): 229-51; Janet Walker, “Spatial Documentary Studies, El Mar La Mar, and Elemental Media Remediated,” The Routledge Handbook of Ecomedia Studies, eds. Antonio López, Adrian Ivakhiv, and Stephen Rust (Routledge, 2018).

[9]Walker, “Rights,” 87.

[10]Walker, “Eavesdropping,” 211.

[11]Walker, “Walking,” 331.

[12]Walker, “Rights,” 86-7.

[13]Walker, “Moving,” 201-224.

[14]Ibid., 215-7.

[15]Ibid., 215.

[16]Walker, “Rights,” 84.

[17]Ibid., 99.

[18]Reuters Fact Check, “Fact Check: Old video of rabbit saved from flames resurfaces during LA wildfires,” Reuters, 15 January 2025, https://www.reuters.com/fact-check/old-video-rabbit-saved-flames-resurfaces-during-la-wildfires-2025-01-15/

[19]Mike Davis, “The Case for Letting Malibu Burn,” Environmental History Review 19, no. 2 (1995), 8.

[20]Ibid., 33.

[21]As one example of wide coverage about the inequalities shaping the 2025 Southern California wildfires, see: Terry Tang, “California wildfires could leave deeper inequality in their wake,” PBS, 13 Jan. 2025: https://www.pbs.org/newshour/nation/california-wildfires-could-leave-deeper-inequality-in-their-wake

[22]Adriana Petryna, “Wildfires at the Edges of Science: Horizoning Work amid Runaway Change,” Cultural Anthropology 33, no. 4 (2018), 571.

[23]Ibid., 588.

[24]Ibid., 577-83.

[25]Walker, “Moving,” 203.

Thomas Patrick Pringle is an Assistant Professor of Cinema and Media Studies at the University of Southern California. With Gertrud Koch and Bernard Stiegler, he is the co-author of Machine (Meson and University of Minnesota Press, 2019). Pringle’s research focuses on media and environmental history. His publications in environmental media studies are available across a range of journals and edited volumes.