what is greenwashing?
Greenwashing from a sustainability picture perspective refers to the deceptive practice in the visual communication of sustainability that creates a false impression of a company being more sustainable than it truly is.
Sustainability actions have real environmental and social impact. Sustainability pictures used in the communication of these actions on the other hand, are often about abstract ideas, unnamed people and unknown places. Pictures of pristine green landscapes, wind turbines in scenic backgrounds and happy people beckon a perfect, harmonious world. Such visual representations, unregulated and unchallenged, present an alternate perspective of sustainability that has little to with reality.
The honest picture project aims to highlight that sustainability has an image problem.
What is an honest picture?
(insights from the use of sustainability pictures)
A collage of the cover pages of sustainability reports of various companies.
Sustainability pictures present an alternate, aesthetic reality.
Why focus on pictures?
How are pictures being used?
How can we help you?
We believe that in our visually oriented contemporary society, pictures play a central role in capturing attention, persuading, and emotionally engaging audiences. Sustainability communication is no exception to this trend, as pictures are increasingly integrated into sustainability reports. We outline our reasons for engaging with pictures in a much more cogent manner in the page outlining our rationale.
We engage in critical analysis of visual sustainability communication through posts and articles which are part of our engagement on social media. We offer both long form content in the form of our blog on this site as well as shorter, more succinct analyses on various social media platforms.
Our work is grounded in a meticulously defined analytical approach outlined in our page on methodology. Our goal is to be able to encourage companies, communication consultants and other stakeholders to reimagine sustainability specifically from the point of view of the manner in which they engage with visual sustainability communication and encourage what we term as honest picture use.
As an integral part of the Honest Picture Project, we have created the Reading Green Pictures tool. This tool that is tailored to analyse corporate sustainability reports has been meticulously developed through extensive research encompassing the realms of visual communication and ethics across various academic disciplines. Our research draws from a vast body of information, including hundreds of journals, books, and conference papers. Furthermore, we collected insights from vast datasets, comprising over 100,000 images sourced from sustainability reports of some of the world's largest companies, including those in the prestigious Fortune 500 list. The tool has also undergone rigorous peer reviews, yielded published conference papers, and been refined through the pursuit of a doctoral degree.