Skip to content
Who's in the Video
Celebrity fashion photographer, Roger Moenks has called NYC home for almost 20 years. Best known for his portraiture, Moenks published three books: The First Class of CLICK; Moving Still; &[…]

Roger Moenks’s I Am Eco Warrior Project aims to stylize the environmental movement as cool or in the frontline of pop culture.

Roger Moenks: Right now or in the past people always think of environment being granola or hippyish or even snobbish.  But they never really think of it like being cool or in the frontline of pop culture.  How can I stylize a movement, an environmental movement and make it interesting.  So this is really what I wanted to do is to create a new – a rebranding of the environmental movement using innovative global thinkers and stylize them in their homes.  But very often the photo drives you to read the story behind it.  So if you look at a picture and you find it attractive you’re going to read about it.  So it is just another way trying to raise awareness and have people take a step back and actually try to learn about somebody.

And in Eco-Warrior there are 53 innovative thinkers are represented with long interviews and their photos.  And I personally think it’s a blueprint of what anybody can take out of it to make better decisions in their own life.  It was important for me to find iconic people for this project because I think having the community that is extremely involved in the environment and environmental concerns be part of a project like I Am Eco-Warrior makes it authentic.  And I went to very specific people like Ted Turner and Howard Buffet and Mayor Bloomberg and I asked them could you, would you mind me taking a photo of you and doing an interview with you to raise awareness and to bring environment into pop culture and make it sexy and cool.
And I think that’s really exciting because you’re using the power of imagery to raise awareness.  It always comes back to, you know, what do you want to do with a specific project or a specific image.  And images have moved the world.  I personally think it’s individuals, big thinkers, that start the chain, the domino effect.  And we have to support these people so they can get to work and keep on raising the awareness and push corporations, governments, society at large to make better decisions.

 


Related