This post is also available in: French

DYSTOPIA
Photographies by Alexa BRUNET

Dystopia is an anticipation photographic series about mutations of agricultural landscape produced by photographer Alexa Brunet and journalist Patrick Herman. With the help of voluntary performers and simple visual means, they stage the transformations of peasant activity linked to industrialization, the race for productivity, the disappearance of peasants and cultivated land, the consequences of using GMOs and pesticides, the dehumanization of the profession etc.

Through the combination of scripted photographs and journalistic texts, they imagine things that haven’t yet happened and acidly illustrate the inevitable changes in French agricultural activity.

”Since the 1970’s, 60% of farmers have disappeared; among survivors, suicide has a prevalence rate of 20% higher than the national average. With the loss of organic matter which is essential to life, soil erosion is constantly getting worse. Hundreds of animal breeds have disappeared. Pesticides are found in our plates and green algae on our seashores. The Breton agro-food model is bankrupt while hunger wins worldwide. Behind the ”modernization”, there is an industrialization encouraged by the state; the utopia of the 1960’s became dystopia. Dystopia tells this reversal by words and images. 2030 is already tomorrow.” – Patrick Herman

DU GAZ SOUS LA TOUNDRA
Photographies by Charles XELOT

The Yamal Peninsula in the Russian Arctic is home to one of the largest gas deposits in the world. The recent development of gigantic industrial facilities in this hostile environment illustrates humanity’s ever-growing appetite for energy. The bare tundra, once traversed by herds of reindeer herders, the Nenets, is now filled with pipes and flares. Tankers and icebreakers sail along the coast, illuminating the night.

This story takes place at the northern end of the Eurasian continent, on the ultimate land border. In Nenets, Yamal means ”the edge of the world”. This geographical border raises the question of the limit of the development of human society. Here, people are living almost as neolithic alongside huge factories of the 21th century. The space between reindeer herders and the industry is unspeakable and unshowable. This area is an in-between on which the photographs of the project are turned.

On the one hand, the men of the past, witnesses and proofs of our ”natural humanity”, on the other hand, the metal and inorganic industry in which men and tubes are interchangeable. These two humanities are nevertheless brought together by the use of fire and the machine.

MIDWAY: MESSAGE FROM THE GYRE
Photographies by Chris JORDAN

On the Midway Atoll, a group of islands more than 2,000 miles far from the nearest continent, the waste of our mass consumption resurfaces in the stomachs of dead albatrosses. This is because chicks are fed with plastic pieces found by their parents, who confuse floating litter with food, over the polluted Pacific Ocean.

With this series, Chris Jordan has documented one of the dramatic effects of consumer plastic waste worldwide: discarded packaging and toys found in the stomachs of thousands of dead albatross babies.