A hard rain's a-gonna fall

Captured in the wild

Print article
Post to Facebook

"Oh, where have you been, my blue-eyed son," asks Bob Dylan in 'A hard rain's gonna fall'. Well, Mark Edwards, photographer, has been away snapping the effects of climate change and of. His conclusion: "we are a crazy crew."

Edwards is in Edinburgh to present the exhibition which accompanies his book, A Hard Rain. Taking a line by line approach to Dylan's song, Edwards selects photos (both his own and that of colleagues') which somehow underline or illuminate the post-nuclear images which comprise 'A hard rain's a-gonna fall'. It's an idea, he says, which arose after he became lost in the Sahara Desert in 1969 – "beautiful place, but no signposts". Rescued by a Tuareg nomad, he was taken back to the camp where, by complete chance, a battered cassette player was playing out Dylan's piercing lyrics. In the finished piece, for example, Dylan's stubborn "I'll stand on the ocean until I start sinkin'" is set alongside an Inuit Hunter, defiant in the face of his disappearing landscape. "Bob Dylan," he says, "gives us a poetic framework to discuss the world as we see it." Played alongside Dylan's rendition of the song the images are frequently revelatory, and always intensely moving. "I understand he likes it," says Edwards of Dylan.

I meet Mark Edwards after his slideshow in the comfort of Rose Street's The Melting Pot. It's an aptly named venue – there are as many people wearing suits and swapping business cards as there are in beads and bangles discussing gap years; there's quite a posh spread, though sandwiches are labelled "meat" or "vegetarian". Could an event held years ago conceivably attract businessmen alongside the usual environmentally concerned audience? Edwards suspects not: "I think this is probably the very first year that this could have been done. We've been facing denial up to 2006, then gradual acknowledgement, and now, you know, businessmen are curious. And concerned."

It's a concern for the environment Edwards himself developed through his photography work: "well, I turned away from photographing war. I felt that it was too exploitative. I felt that people were covering wars, but were overlooking the everyday life. So, I was working with Newsweek then and I just decided not to do it anymore. I wanted to photograph everyday life, and then, really, you are on to the environment."

It seems unfair to note but, with his mane of straight white hair, Edwards does look a touch like Sir Jimmy Saville – a sensibly dressed, softly spoken and altogether more dignified Saville, but Saville nonetheless. Problems with the environment? Mark'll fix it! Actually, he's keen demonstrate that—unlike zany kids' wishes to eat lunch on a roller coaster—the environment isn't a problem he can solve himself, but only through as yet unrealised collective action. Cause, then, for despondency? Certainly, several of the photographs in the collection are deeply disturbing to the point that they have a polarising effect such that the woman to my right tuts while the gentlemen on my left nods sagely. I wonder if these sort of habits are conditioned by years on the environmental activism circuit. That is until the image of a bloated body, washed up on the beach outside the Taj Mahal draws an audible intake of breath from everyone. Edwards excels in capturing images of people caught by elements of their environment which are out of their control. The contrast between the opulence of India's most famous building, and the body of a man whose family could not afford a funeral pyre—a body picked over by vultures and nibbled at by stray dogs—is truly shocking.

Only the picture of cutesy polar bears evoke a stifled giggle and it's for this reason that Edwards admits to having considered taking it out: "It doesn't really send the right message. Not really the right tone for the presentation," he tells me. For the same reason he asks the audience not to clap following the final frame, though there's a great temptation to do so – perhaps precisely to break the tension. No polar bears? No clapping? Is it the case, then, that 'Hard Rain' is simply lamenting over what humans have done to the world – a world in which "each pregnant woman has at least one type of pesticide in her placenta."

"The impression I get is that people find it bleak but, you know, uplifting, actually." Indeed, following the slideshow there's a great deal optimism as attendees discuss the photographs and excitedly ask Mark to sign copies of A Hard Rain. "I think people see that this is a stepping stone. It helps people act towards action."

The action he is talking about fits neatly into line with his support from the Stop Climate Chaos coalition, and is why Edwards has been sending copies of the book to leaders and politicians in every country across the globe. It is, after all, a global problem: "we pretend that we are independent at our peril," he solemnises. "We are interdependent." Indeed, some of the most striking contrasts in Edwards's work come through demonstrating a sort of savage irony in the corruption of this interdependence: New Yorkers scoff food while thousands of Kosovan refugees all reach out, apparently, for one loaf of bread; a bird drags itself from an oil-slick (see Feature), whereas Philippine children dive into the polluted waters of Manilla bay, scavenging plastic for recycling.

He is keen to point out that he doesn't subscribe to any idea of this as deliberate behaviour by some mythically nefarious West. "People aren't sitting around saying: 'let's destroy the world.'" He's similarly unhappy with any romanticisation of dying rural communities. "Urbanisation," after all, "provides a way to tackle poverty which can't occur in the countryside." He is, however, concerned by the reaction time of richer nations: "we knew about the problem in the 1980's, we knew the scale of the problem, and it's taken all that time to get to this point. You know, people just wanted to go on living as they had done before, and the result is more destruction. But what government, unless there's a mass movement, can really put money into doing anything like [the steps towards CO2 reduction suggested by Stop Climate Chaos]?

Nonetheless, even as his photo missives are being sent, one gets the impression that the response has not yet been overwhelming: "it's too early," he says, though his anecdote in which a copy of the book addressed to George W. Bush, via the American Embassy in London, was returned with "not known at this address" scrawled across the label is perhaps indicative of the wider difficulty of being heard. A fairly dry response from former PM Tony Blair while in office reads: "the government is playing its part and I hope that [Hard Rain] encourages others to do so too." Leader of the Westminster Conservatives, David Cameron, has been more receptive, writing that "the lesson from this book is not only of the damage we are causing, but of the shared responsibility we all have to respond." But this, and those promised actions which, "step by step, can make a real difference," are perhaps a luxury of opposition.

If America and England are proving for the moment intransigent, though, there remain many countries eager to hear of Edwards's work. Throughout our interview, there's a somewhat of a kerfuffle going on in the background: Edwards is off to the Scottish parliament to address MSPs in the Cross Party Group on Climate Change in a few hours and, naturally, there's an effort to organise car pooling in order to get him there. I wonder whether it really is such a big step from environmental photographer, to political lobbyist. It seems unusual that a photographer should become the ambassador for the photographs they take, personally providing the political impetus for the issues they express in parliaments around the world. "I think it is very new, yes. I'm not aware of it ever happening before."

"I've just spoken at the Belgian parliament and I've got the Lithuanian parliament next week. It's all prompted by other people saying "you should get this guy along". I can't say if there's anything special happening, but they've been receptive to the suggestion, anyway."

There's understatement in the word "receptive" which indicates that, in fact, his aims go beyond just recognition, and that his photography could really prove effective in jolting collective minds into real action. Indeed, Edwards's presentation opens with the photograph Earthrise – the slightly catchier title for NASA image AS8-14-2383HR. Taken from onboard Apollo 8 on the 1968 mission to the moon, the snap shows the Earth seeming to 'rise' from the horizon of the moon. It's the most visually stunning slap-down of any Earth-centric perceptions of the universe ever recorded on film: the Earth, blue and fragile seems tiny amid the blackness of space, such that the image is "the most influential environmental photograph ever taken," according to photographer Galen Rowell. Percy Bysshe made the claim that "poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world," referring, in part, to their ability to shape ideas and perceptions in a very public way. Could it be that photographers, equally, have this magical capacity to legislate?

He seems to enjoy this suggestion. "It's a great quote, isn't it," he grins. He has his own analogy ready: "Photographs have had an effect like putting a rock in a stream. They divert the course of things. So they do have an effect. You know, sometimes a very powerful picture has to come along at the right moment, and then it has an effect." This is, one suspects, an understated way of saying that now, perhaps, is the right moment for these images to spring into action. This is the aim of his planned project, 'Remaking a world gone wrong', which is eventually to run alongside 'A Hard Rain' and suggest real-world solutions for change. I'm eager to discover what some of these might be. There's a pause, lengthened by the forkful of salad heading into his mouth – as well as the drips of vinaigrette cascading from plate to floor. "We want to research best practice and then get pictures." Clearly, there is a lot left to do.

But Mark Edwards is not alone in seeking to shift global environmental policy through multimedia presentations coming, as he does, hot on the heels of Al Gore's acclaimed documentary, An Inconvenient Truth. If environmental politics have reached a stage of such visibility, it seems an opportune time to spice up the competition between its visible proponents. Whose slideshow, then, is better?

He laughs: "I think Al Gore has done the most amazing thing, I think it's an extraordinary slideshow and he's an incredible speaker. It's main achievement has been to convince many Americans that there's a problem. I think they are very different slideshows actually. I showed him the show and he sang along to the whole of 'A hard rain's gonna fall'. Then it came to the picture of Abu Ghraib prison and he burst into tears and threw his arms around me and said, 'Mark, this is absolutely wonderful'. He's a great guy, in my opinion."

Comment on this article

	You need to have an account to post comments.
	Enter your login details below to post, or sign up for an account
User name:
Password:
Comment: