Hard Rain: A Timely Reminder
Jennifer Marshall
19 January 2010, 04:35“Hard Rain” showcases a selection of confronting images taken by renowned environmental photographer, Mark Edwards’, over a period of over 40 years during his travels through more than 150 countries. The exhibition was launched at the Eden Project in Cornwall, UK in 2006 and has since attracted the endorsement of political and environmental leaders around the world.
Inspired by Bob Dylan’s iconic song, “A Hard Rain’s A Gonna-Fall” in 1969, Edwards harnessed his passion and commitment for the environment and undertook a journey of discovery during which he captured images of compelling environmental and humanitarian issues with the hope of inspiring and educating others. During this time, Edwards witnessed abject poverty, environmental disasters, humanitarian neglect and abuse and countries irrevocably damaged by the effects of global warming. His photographs attest to this myriad of tragedies.
Edwards was inspired to undertake this life-long pilgrimage in 1969 when he was effectively rescued from the Sahara by a Tuareg nomad on the day Aldrin landed on the moon, a day that heralded a new, exciting future for science and the advancement of the human race. However, as Lylod Timberlake writes in his introductory essay to the book accompanying the exhibition, scientific advances made over the course of the 20th century face two apparently contradictory challenges in the 21st century, “living and consuming within planetary means [and] …. helping billions of people toward safe, fulfilled and dignified lives, meaning that many people need to consume more, not less.”
Edwards’ powerful and confronting images highlight the confluence, and cause and effect relationship, of so many enduring environmental and humanitarian wrongs which, in the past, have been treated as individual issues. One such example is “Logging Road, Amazon, Brazil” in which Surui children watch as a bulldozer ploughs through their reservation, the family having been forced to sell their timber to pay for medicine for tuberculosis which they contracted after the BR364 highway was built through their land. This photograph and its story clearly show how modern progress so often fails much of the world’s less fortunate with only a relative few reaping the benefits. In our attempts to advance the human race, technology has often progressed at the expense of the health of our planet. Needless consumption and inequitable distribution of resources have resulted in the neglect of basic needs for sustaining life for many.
Another photograph appears along side Dylan’s lyrics, “I’ve walked and I’ve crawled on six crooked highways”. Impoverished refugees are depicted fleeing the East Pakistan border into India in 1971. One man carries his half-naked wife, stripped of any dignity and pride and ill with cholera. The photograph might be interpreted as a shadow of the past however, Edwards emphasizes that if sea levels rise as a result of global warming by just one metre, 20 million people would be made homeless in Bangladesh and India alone. Global warning is a threat as great as the wars that have occurred and continue to rage across the globe and the poverty stricken will be the first to suffer the potentially devastating effects of climate change.
Bob Dylan’s song evokes the fear faced by a generation contemplating the possibility of the end of the world as they knew it through nuclear war. In collaborating with Dylan and illustrating his verses with his devastating images, Edwards delivers a timely reminder of the destruction taking place across our globe and the environmental crisis faced by our own generation as a result of our unimpeded “progress” and tolerance of humanitarian and environmental abuses.
Dylan asks, “And what’ll you do now, my darling young one?” These issues aren’t new to any of us and although activists and artists like Edwards seek to influence those in power to engage and effect changes on a global scale, “Hard Rain” forces each individual to take responsibility for the state of the world. It urges us to wake from complacency, to keep these tragedies alive in our hearts and embrace them as part of our humanity. The world through which we have succeeded in establishing a global community now implores us to take it into our protection, in precedence to any national interests or competing goals. Our roles as individuals must surely be to take action at every level of our lives, to “….tell it and speak it and think it and breathe it”.
Religare Arts currently hosts the exhibition, in collaboration with the British Council, at its gallery in Connaught Place, New Delhi. Religare Arts is an organization committed to the promotion of investment in art and the encouragement and development of aspiring artists.
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