Captivating photographs divulge a ‘staged model’ of nature

A Maasai guy appears out at Kenya’s Maasai Mara National Reserve. But that is no pristine desert: in the back of him are the remnants of a “champagne picnic experience” for vacationers.

“Tourists are paying for the privilege of re-enacting a scene from a colonial film,” says photographer Zed Nelson. “The Maasai warrior is being paid to add authenticity to the scene.” The symbol is a part of Nelson’s sequence The Anthropocene Illusion, which gained him Photographer of the Year on the Sony World Photography Awards closing month and is featured in a brand new e book of the similar title. Nelson travelled to 14 international locations to create the sequence, which presentations how, as the arena spirals deeper into environmental disaster, a stage-managed model of nature is proliferating.

In every other picture from the sequence, onlookers apply a whale shark at China’s Chimelong Ocean Kingdom, the arena’s greatest aquarium (pictured above). “It’s an enormous creature with an enormous range in its natural habitat, which raises serious questions about the ethics of keeping it there,” says Nelson. Pictured underneath, a snow cannon produces synthetic snow at a ski lodge within the Dolomite mountains in Italy. Around 90 in step with cent of Italian ski lodges now depend on synthetic snow to stay open.

“The series is, in essence, about how we have divorced ourselves from the natural world, and are in the process of destroying it,” says Nelson. “It looks at how an artificial version of nature has proliferated – I would argue to hide from ourselves what we have done, and to satisfy our craving for a communion with nature.”