The new landscape photography: land and despoilation

July 17, 2009 by William Shaw
Filed under: William Shaw 

memoire-2006
From Baloji Mémoire, 2006 series by Sammy Baloji, Katanga, DRC

Sammy Baloiji is one of twelve photographers shortlisted for the 2009 Prix Pictet, a prize for photography about sustainability. The premise behind his series is simple – to superimpose photographs from the Congo’s colonial past over modern photographs of the consequences of that history. The Congo has been well and truly raped for minerals and other resources over the last century; for that see Adam Hochschild’s King Leopold’s Ghost. Also this blog post about Mongrel’s Tantalum Memorial.

The theme for the 2009 Prix Pictet was “Earth”. The 2009 shortlist is really phenomenal and includes work from the great Darren Almond, Yao Lu’s remarkable Chinese landscapes constructed from rubbish won the 2008 Paris Photo Prize, Edward Burtynsky’s scary/beautiful quarry photographs, and this series, again from quarries, from Naoya Hatakeyama:
hatakeyamaBlast #5707 by Naoya Hatakeyama, 1998 Japan

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2 Comments on The new landscape photography: land and despoilation

  1. Prix Pictet winner: Nadav Kander’s Yangtze river project : The Center for Sustainable Practice in the Arts on Tue, 10th Nov 2009 8:24 pm

    2. [...] Darren Almond, Edward Burtynsky (again) and  Andreas Gursky and others. I’ve blogged about the brilliant shortlist [...]

  2. News Room :: Prix Pictet winner: Nadav Kander’s Yangtze river project on Tue, 10th Nov 2009 9:14 pm

    3. [...] Darren Almond, Edward Burtynsky (again) and  Andreas Gursky and others. I’ve blogged about the brilliant shortlist [...]

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