This article interrogates historical photographs exhibited at public heritage sites in Aotearoa New Zealand. The analysis reveals that – by portraying 19th-century environmental change as a ‘heroic’ narrative of ‘progress’ – the photographs construct New Zealand national identity in opposition to nature, rather than promote a sense of connectedness with the natural environment. The article thus makes three important contributions to the literature on the visualization of environmental and climate change. First, the empirical case study demonstrates that visual narratives shape our social identities in relation to nature. Second, the article adds a rare socio-semiotic analysis to the environmental communication literature, highlighting that photographs have to be examined through multimodal methods and in relation to wider discursive processes of meaning making. Third, by borrowing ideas from the literature on collective memory, the article shows that, even though they depict scenes that are set in the distant past, historical photographs can still influence environmental attitudes and behaviours in the present.

这篇文章询问了在新西兰 Aotearoa 的公共遗产地展出的历史照片。分析表明——通过将 19 世纪的环境变化描绘为“进步”的“英雄”叙事——这些照片构建了与自然相对的新西兰民族认同，而不是促进与自然环境的联系感。因此，本文对环境和气候变化可视化的文献做出了三项重要贡献。首先，实证案例研究表明，视觉叙事塑造了我们与自然相关的社会身份。其次，文章在环境传播文献中增加了一种罕见的社会符号学分析，强调必须通过多模态方法以及与更广泛的意义构建话语过程相关来检查照片。第三，通过借鉴集体记忆文献的观点，文章表明，即使它们描绘的是遥远过去的场景，历史照片仍然可以影响当下的环境态度和行为。