Get Your Free Web Ring Webring by Bravenet.com

Dry and cracked soil in Gansu Province.2009

“Desertification is one of the most serious threats facing humanity”- Kofi Annan, former UN Secretary General. World Day to Combat Desertification and Drought. 2006.

A tourist stands on one of the large sand dunes that make up the Shapotou Desert tourist resort. The resort has provided jobs for local residents and has been a way for the local economy to benefit from the desert. 2009

“The dryness affects our lives a lot. We call it the ‘black disaster’, which means there is no grass. On the grassland, we are afraid of this disaster”, says Zamusu, a farmer who has lived his entire life on the central grasslands of  Inner Mongolia, in Northern China. These legendary grasslands are slowly deteriorating, suffering as a result of the world’s least reported environmental crisis.

A theme park in Ningxia Province is shrouded in sand during a sandstorm. Sandstorms occur as the spring winds blow and throw dry and degraded topsoil into the air. 2009

Desertification is the gradual transformation of arable and/or habitable land into desert, usually caused by overpopulation, water mismanagement, poor farming methods, the destructive use of land by industry and climate change.

Workers at the Shapotou desert theme park take a break as work slows. 2009

38% of the world’s surface area is now threatened by desertification, affecting countries across the world from North Africa, the countries of the Middle East, Australia, China and the western edge of South America.

A tourist runs in the desert in Ningxia province. 2009

“If we don’t take action, current trends suggest that by 2020 an estimated 60 million people could move from desertified areas of sub-Saharan Africa towards North Africa and Europe, and that worldwide, 135 million people could be placed at risk of being uprooted”, Kofi Annan (2006).

Creeping sands in Inner Mongolia swallow a fence at the side of a road. 2009

In 2007 I began photographing the issue of desertification and how it was affecting the lives of people in one of the world’s hardest hit countries, China. With the help of grants from the David Alan Harvey Fund for Emerging Photographers in 2008 and the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting in 2009, I have been able to document how the people of China are being affected by this crisis, which has consumed over 20% of their country.

The grasslands of Inner Mongolia are suffering as a result of overgrazing and pressure put on them by rapid population and industry growth in the area. 2009

To learn more about how you can help combat desertification, please visit the Million Tree Project which aims to reforest areas of Inner Mongolia being affected by desertification.

A sandstorm descends on a bridge in Ningxia Province, bringing life to an almost standstill. 2009

I just noticed today that I haven’t had a new post up for 10 days! Wow. I have been quite busy of late, having just got back from a shoot in the Chinese city of Hangzhou where I teamed up again with the Globe & Mail’s Mark Mackinnon for a new story. More on that to come in later posts.

A lot of my work appeared online in various blogs and magazines this week, which was great.

Burn Magazine Logo

On David Alan Harvey’s magazine, Burn, he published a short selection of my images that I took from the recent trip I took to North Korea. David edited these images himself actually, sequencing them also in the way he saw best fit. If you read the dialogue, he offers a few insights into how he went about this and his thoughts on editing. As this work is quite new to me, I was more than happy for David to help me create a voice for this work. To see what he came up with, go here.

Resolve Logo

Also, over on the liveBooks’ blog RESOLVE (for whom I am a regular contributor) my final post about some of my experiences photographing desertification for the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting, went up this week. If you missed some my earlier writings for RESOLVE, please go here, here and here to see them.

Duckrabbit Logo

Finally and by no means least, the excellent multimedia website duckrabbit featured a short highlight of some of my recent work focusing on both my desertification work and that in North Korea.

I can’t encourage you enough to go and check out all three of the above outlets. They are all very exciting venues for photography online at the moment.

The International Photography Awards Logo

I’m very happy to announce that my work for the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting on ‘China’s Growing Sands’ has been awarded 2nd place in the Editorial: Environmental Professional category at the International Photography Awards 2009. This is the first prize recognition I have had for this body of work and I am happy that it can serve as another avenue to promote the issue and the message of the crisis the north of China is currently facing.

I was pipped to 1st place by the excellent photographer Ed Kashi, who I have mentioned here on my blog before. Like me, he is a regular contributer over on the Resolve blog and has been extensively covering the issues surrounding oil in the Niger Delta. I very much admire Ed’s work and I encourage you to check out more of his work here.

1st, 2nd and 3rd places in the Editorial: Environmental Pro Category

In choosing my photos for entry, I had to narrow down my whole work to 5 key images. You can see the selection that I went with in the picture below. It was a very tough choice but I decided to go for the ones which were singularly the most striking and which worked best together as a set of five.

The 5 images entered as 'China's Growing Sands' entry.

You can see all the images that placed in the competition here. Happy browsing. There are some great images in there!

One of the blogs I regularly check out is RESOLVE, the blog of liveBooks. It’s a great resource and window into the workings of photographers, across a spectrum of genres. They have regular contributions from excellent photographers such as Ed Kashi, Reza and Art Wolfe,  all writing detailed articles about various aspects of their lives as pro-photographers. When I was beginning photography, one of the biggest insights for me was to read about photographers’ thoughts on what they were shooting, why they were shooting it, how they were shooting it etc. I believe no matter what stage of  our careers we are at, we can still learn, and it’s great to read about the experiences of other pro-photographers to help improve and learn from others’ experiences.

I was flattered recently when Miki Johnson, the editor of RESOLVE, asked me to become a contributor and write about my experiences whilst conducting my recent work for the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting. I’ll be contributing a series of about 4 posts over the coming weeks for RESOLVE, detailing many of the facets involved with my trip including preparation, shooting in-the-field, post-production and distributing the final work. You can read my first post here, which deals with finding the idea for a story and applying for funding.