In six years and four continents, London -based documentary photographer Z Nelson has investigated how humans have immersed themselves into a rapidly fake environment to mask their destructive divorce from the natural world. Everything from theme parks and zoos to national parks and African safari, their images reveal not only a desperate craving for a world relationship that we have returned to our back, but also a global event of denial and collective self-confusion. “People come to see them unfamiliar and to see them,” they say. “Now they can go to see what is not now, what is endangered, which we have lost.”
In your new photo book, Anthropocene confusionNelson writes, “In a small part of our earth history, we humans have changed their world beyond anything experienced in millions of years.” Their images documentation of our fast fruitless efforts to create a simulatory of an edenic natural world, which none of us have really experienced. The number of wild animals on Earth has been halved in the last 40 years, and there are no signs of slowing down from that decline. We are forcing animals and plants to extinct by removing their houses. Future geologists will probably find evidence in rock stratea of ​​an unprecedented human impact on our planet – plastic hung concentrations, declining from fossil fuel burning, and huge deposits of concrete used for the manufacture of our cities.
Nevertheless, there is a desire for contact with deeper, nature within us. So we call Nelson a “platform-managed, artificial ‘experience’, a confident spectacle”.
Nelson wrote in the afterward of his book, “Charles Darwin reduced humans for only another species – a branch on the grand tree of life.” “But now, the paradigm has shifted: mankind is no longer another species. We are going to rebuild the biology and chemistry of the earth.
As seen in John Molem wild onesTheir cultural history of wild animals and our relationship with them, “We are on white gloves in the forest everywhere, directing traffic.”
