Photographer of the year Zed Nelson on documenting the decimation of nature by humans

Recently crowned photographer of the year at the Sony World Photography Awards, Zed Nelson has spent the last six years exploring and documenting the world. Not our world exactly, but one that he describes as The Anthropocene Illusion.

“Geologists were arguing that we should call the current age that we’re living in a new epoch called the Anthropocene,” Nelson explains.

“They’re normally measured in these huge events like an ice age or a meteor strike. The impact of humans on Earth in the last 200 years has been so huge and so devastating that it will be measurable in the rock that’s being created under our feet in the geological layer. While we are creating so much of an impact on the world and divorcing ourselves from nature and devastating the natural world, we create an illusion to hide from ourselves what we’re doing. 

“When we’re immersed in something we cease to see it.”

Nelson travelled across 14 countries documenting the decimation of nature and the acts of imagination and adaptation we’ve taken to ignore the problem. He talks us through three pictures from his book of the project.

Snow cannon at Dolomites ski resort

Most people know that there are these snow cannons at ski resorts, but what I didn’t know is that there were often 200 working at every resort, installed permanently. And they’re running throughout the night producing artificial snow, and a lot of these resorts rely on them entirely now to keep the ski season going. Tourists want that illusion of the perfect champagne-quality ski slope. We demand guaranteed skiing. 

Walk With Lions tourist experience

The project looks at artificiality; the fake and synthesised versions of nature that we create. Because animals are living in diminishing habitats, they become performers, allowed to live for our reassurance. 

What you have here is lion farms in South Africa, breeding sometimes 200 in a facility. They take baby cubs away from their parents when they’re a few days old, and let human tourists bottle-feed them. So these lions grow up tame, away from their mothers. When they’re a bit older they’re used for walking with lions experiences.

Then, when they get bigger and more unpredictable, they are sold to trophy hunters who come to Africa to kill a lion in some sort of twisted colonial fantasy. It’s called captive-bred hunting, where these semi tamed lions are released into a large enclosure from which they can’t escape.

It’s kind of extraordinary because they look like pussycats, drinking out of the puddle. They’re beautiful animals and standing there with them is joyful, but it hides something truly awful that’s happening underneath.

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Attack of the giant toddler

There’s a theme park in Italy near Rimini called Italia in Miniatura, just a scaled-down version of Italy. There is a miniaturised Dolomite mountain range made of fibreglass. I love this picture because this little girl is crawling across them. Is she giant or are the mountains tiny? It’s not quite clear at first glance what’s happening, the scale is a bit befuddling, but it’s just another example of packaged nature offered up to us for our enjoyment. Nature made easy. 

The Anthropocene Illusion by Zed Nelson is out now (Guest Editions, £40)

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