In 2005, Joel Sternfeld traveled to Montreal to document the eleventh United Nations conference on climate change. Published by Steidl in 2008, *When it Changed* gathers the core of this project into a 150-page volume centered on fifty-three color portraits of conference participants. Approaching his subjects through tight, mezzo-busto framing, Sternfeld invokes classical portrait conventions dating back to the Renaissance while capturing an unmistakably contemporary anxiety across each face.

Accompanying these portraits is an extensive chronology compiled from periodicals and journals, formatted like wire-service dispatches. This running textual record maps the prior twenty years of climatic shifts, tracking scientific research, forecasts by climatologists, governmental and non-governmental measures, and the catastrophic physical events unfolding across global landscapes. The pairing grounds individual human expression within an evolving timeline of ecological reality.

For collectors of documentary photography and photobooks addressing environmental history, *When it Changed* represents a focused, rigorous intersection of portraiture and archival reporting. Rather than depicting degraded landscapes, Sternfeld concentrates on the human actors tasked with addressing planetary crisis, framing this historical moment as a critical juncture in humanity’s relationship with the earth.