'There’s not much positive:' humanity's relationship to water – in photos

In 2002, decades into a long and dis­tin­guished career with the famed Mag­num Pho­tos agency, Ian Berry trav­elled to the Hubei province in cen­tral Chi­na. He’d heard that the 2,335 metre-long, impos­ing­ly engi­neered Three Gorges Dam on the Yangtze Riv­er was near­ing com­ple­tion and want­ed to see its progress for him­self. Upon arrival, though, he found that the path to the build­ing site wouldn’t be so simple.

“I got onto [the Chi­nese author­i­ties],” Berry recalls. ​“And they want­ed $3,000 or $4,000 for a per­mit for me to go and pho­to­graph the dam. I thought ​‘sod it’.’”

Via a com­pli­cat­ed net­work of fer­ries, taxis and pub­lic trans­port, Berry made his own way to the source of the 3,915 mile (6,300km) long Yangtze, before trav­el­ling down­stream towards the dam, where a local cab dri­ver offered to dri­ve him around for a day so he could see it up close. Repeat­ed­ly flick­ing the shut­ter of his Leica, Berry took sev­er­al pho­tographs of what was then the world’s largest dam, but quick­ly realised that its effects weren’t just lim­it­ed to con­trol­ling flood­ing and gen­er­at­ing hydro­elec­tric power.

“I shot a lot of peo­ple being dis­placed – an awful lot had been flood­ed out,” he says. One pho­to­graph he took depicts a woman in Wanx­i­an, Sichuan Province, sleep­ing on a chair next to piles of rub­ble, forced to leave her home as her vil­lage was being demol­ished to make space for the Yangtze’s new, post-dam path.

That heart­break­ing shot is pre­sent­ed in his new pho­to­book Water, which col­lates images from Berry’s long-term project doc­u­ment­ing the myr­i­ad ways peo­ple around the world inter­act with one of life’s most impor­tant elements.

“[After the Three Gorges Dam] I real­ly got into it, then and I start­ed to trav­el a lot – Bangladesh, India, refugee camps in Cen­tral Amer­i­ca, West Africa, South Africa, New Zealand, Aus­tralia, Cam­bo­dia, Viet­nam,” he says. ​“All over the world, basically.”

From the dozens of giant dams built in an attempt to con­trol flood­ing, to Green­land’s break­ing ice sheet, to the hor­ri­fy­ing effects of arsenic pol­lu­tion in drink­ing sup­plies, Berry’s black-and-white pic­tures are a stark and pow­er­ful por­trait of humanity’s abuse of water. It’s a con­tin­u­a­tion of a long fas­ci­na­tion for Berry that began in the 70s, when he began doc­u­ment­ing the role of water in reli­gious rit­u­als. But his goals changed as the effects of cli­mate change became appar­ent to him.

“My wife [Kathie Web­ber] is a jour­nal­ist. She wrote [the intro­duc­tion] for the book, and she start­ed to press me to have a broad­er out­look on the whole thing,” Berry explains. ​“It occurred to me that times are chang­ing, and I should real­ly extend [the project] to water, rather than water and religion.”

Water, of course, is one of the most impor­tant keys to life on our plan­et, account­ing for 71% of the Earth’s sur­face and around 60% of the human body. It can also cause untold destruc­tion. Water’s ero­sive capa­bil­i­ties led Web­ber to describe the ele­ment as a ​“uni­ver­sal sol­vent” in the introduction.

That destruc­tion applies not only to the val­leys that it carves, or cliffs that it reclaims. Despite water’s abun­dance, fresh, drink­able water is scarce – and becom­ing ever scarcer as glac­i­ers shrink and sea lev­els rise under the effects of cli­mate change. Con­trol­ling its sup­ply has become a geo-polit­i­cal imper­a­tive. Hav­ing been wit­ness to sev­er­al such attempts to gain con­trol, Berry pre­dicts a grim fore­cast for the future. ​“These dams being built in the north­east of Turkey are going to leave them con­trol­ling the water into Jor­dan and Israel,” Berry says. ​“They’ll be fight­ing wars in the Mid­dle East over water, not oil.” In recent years, dams in Turkey have already caused the dis­place­ment of com­mu­ni­ties and dis­rup­tion of sup­ply, both local­ly and in neigh­bour­ing coun­tries like Syria.

While some pho­tographs in the book hint at cul­tures and prac­tices where water is treat­ed with respect – Hin­dus bathing and pray­ing in the Ganges at Varanasi, for exam­ple – these moments are out­weighed by the scale of the world’s prob­lems. ​“There’s not much pos­i­tive to be hon­est,” he con­tin­ues, with a heavy sigh. ​“You see peo­ple chucked out of their hous­es and it is hard to find any­thing to be pos­i­tive about.”

Water by Ian Berry is pub­lished by GOST.

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