"The land, and what we add to it, cannot lie" - Dave Thomas

These pictures are all about people, without ever directly showing a single person. Rather, they examine what we add or subtract to the landscape, how we modify the world around us, and what this might tell us about ourselves.

Human traces on the land can be as simple and transient as footprints across estuary sand, or as mysterious and ancient as petroglyphs in the high desert. They can be deliberate and practical, inspired by religion, or for the purposes of art. At other times they can be accidental and even surreal.
THE SALTON SEA
The Salton Sea - a huge saline lake in southern California - was formed accidentally around a century ago by a catastrophic mismanagement of irrigation from the Colorado River. Over two years a vast tract of the desert, including the town of Salton, was swallowed by the water. Although the area enjoyed some success as a tourist resort up to the 1950s, the fact that the sea is sustained primarily by agricultural run-off has led to spiralling salinity and pollution levels, and severe flooding. Some beaches around the sea are actually made from the bones of thousands of fish killed by selenium poisoning and bacterial and algae blooms, and nowadays this artificial landscape is largely empty of human presence, and dotted with the abandoned remains of caravan parks, motels and marinas.

CHERNOBYL & PRIPYAT

In the early 1980s the constructed landscape in this part of northern Ukraine was a paragon of rational modernity - dominated by a huge nuclear facility surrounded by heavy industry, and a new town - Pripyat - built to be a model Soviet city for the workforce. The explosion in 1986, though, had an even greater impact on the land - making a huge area uninhabitable, seeding the soil with radiation that will last for thousands of years, and preserving the architecture of an ideology that has passed into history elsewhere.
See the full set of Chernobyl pictures in The Zone section.
POWER
THE DESERT
ENTRANCE
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