Just out in the French magazine, WE DEMAIN. It's a collection of my panoramic landscapes shot on the Yellow River over a decade. The work accompanies expanded captions, an attempt to capture the complex forces our environment undergoes in its incremental alteration, often overlooked, until we arrive at its nadir. The reality is our march to realise our collective dreams in linearly designed economies is fundamentally transformative both in the positive and negative ways. Societies get rich at the expense of the environment, and it's not sustainable.
How to come to terms with the production of our material desires in faraway lands? And how do we accept our rivers being polluted in exchange for realising dreams in advancing our lives and economy?
The Yellow River is culturally and historically significant to China; it is the birthplace of one of the oldest civilisations in the world. Yet, it was never immune, especially in recent decades, to the violence that has been inflicted upon it to realise the Chinese Dream. A dream in many ways not dissimilar to the American Dream. I love this quote of E.O Wilson that Evan Osnos from the New Yorker quotes and elaborates upon: "Biologist, E. O. Wilson, traced the birth of 'modern humanity,' to a moment "about ten thousand years ago with the invention of agriculture. The economic history that followed," he wrote, "can be summarised very succinctly as follows: people used every means they could devise to convert the resources of Earth into wealth." That was true, of course, in the history of the United States, and it is now true, on a scale we have never seen, in China."
I meant to return one more time since nothing is ever really complete when you can keep tinkering away. But COVID happened. So I'm now busy printing work prints to make a selection for a book. For some reason, it's this part of a long process that makes me feel the most anxious. Perhaps because there is so much at stake, and it requires such careful planning. All of which scares the living Bejesus out of me despite having been a photographer for so long. One step at a time... #yellowriver #china #climatechange #landscapephotography #environment https://www.instagram.com/p/CE4G32cAbiW/?igshid=1j4oele4mg2jl
