Water

Water – Over the course of 15 years, Magnum photojournalist Ian Berry travelled the globe to document the inextricable links between landscape, life and water. This new book brings together a selection of the resulting images which collectively tell the story of man’s complex relationship with water — at a time when climate change demonstrates just how precariously water and life are intertwined.

The inspiration for Berry to embark on this ambitious project was reporting Greenland’s shrinking glaciers and ice melt, working alongside Danish climatologists, for The Climate Group. This coincided with increased concern and awareness of climate change acceleration, and he found himself increasingly documenting the extremes of wildfires, droughts, floods, pollution, deforestation, and the people impacted by these events.

The photographs in the book illustrate the dichotomy of our relationship with water—the role it plays in ancient religious rituals and in building communities, to its exploitation and the devastating result of too little or too much water. They depict Hindus bathing in the Ganges, shellfish-gatherers in coastal Spain; cities leveled to be flooded for the Three Gorges Dam in China; polluted sea surrounding oil infrastructure in Baku, Azerbaijan; fishermen in Greenland navigating melting ice in the ocean; landscapes transformed to dust bowls by drought in South Africa and to villages made into islands by annual flooding in Bangladesh. It was not Berry’s intention to make a political book, nor an authoritative catalog of man’s interactions with water, but instead to share the most memorable stories from his assignments that illustrate how water shapes our lives and what the future may hold.