This Earth Day, we revisit some of our favourite previously published photo and art projects from the Dazed archives by image-makers including Adam Rouhana, Gleeson Paulino and Yelena Yemchuk. Taken across the globe – from the highlands of Scotland to the rainforests of the Amazon and the ice sheets of Greenland, from pre-war Ukraine to occupied Palestine – these works celebrate nature’s beauty while simultaneously exploring the fractured relationships between humans and the environments we inhabit.
Inuuteq Storch documents the everyday life of Greenlandic people against vast and magnificent icy backdrops; Daniel Jack Lyons amplifies trans and queer voices in the Amazon while exploring how indigenous traditions, environmental catastrophe and political unrest intersect; Marcus Riggs draws inspiration from Maya Angelou’s “Still I Rise” in a photo series celebrating the fortitude of the human spirit; and Adam Rouhana reminds us of the profoundly human interactions that playout amongst nature.
At a time when ecological collapse is entangled with political violence, cultural erasure and systemic inequality, the climate crisis reveals itself not just as an environmental emergency, but as a deeply human one. Collectively, these projects encourage us to reconnect and heal, and pull us back towards nature. Where data and headlines often fail to resonate, these images capture the emotion, urgency and beauty of what’s at stake.
Camille Lemoine, Down Tower Road15 Images
Camille Lemoine’s photo series Down Tower Road drives us to challenge our approach to the environment as a resource. Dramatic backdrops of wind-brushed grasses and amethyst heathers are juxtaposed with human bodies against dark skies, shot on the meditative moorlands of Scotland, where the photographer lives. Down Tower Road started through an exploration into community and belonging, though Lemoine soon recognised that nature plays a part in this. “I consider community as something that extends beyond people: the tadpoles, moths, heather and fungi are all part of this wider network and my own personal identity,” the photographer previously told Dazed. “My intention was to show the body surrendering to its natural source.” Alongside writers like Kathleen Jamie and Nan Shepherd, and land artists such as Ana Mendieta, Lemoine is also influenced by the Gaelic language. “Gaelic has a huge array of ‘nature’ words that are usually very visually descriptive, for example, there are over 100 words for hill or mountain. I wonder if we all had 100 words for ‘hill’ and recognised the importance of each mound, would we change the way we viewed nature and stop seeing it as a single anonymous resource? As we lose land and species, it’s not just a physical loss, but an emotional and cultural one. It will be important to remember not just what these things look like, but how they made us feel.”
Read the full story here.
Yelena Yemchuk, Malanka (2024)11 Images
Pre-war, in 2019 and 2020, Ukrainian-American artist Yelena Yemchuk made pilgrimages to Kransoilsk, Ukraine, to celebrate and capture the mysticism of Malanka. “The story of Malanka is based on a folk tale pre-Christian origins,” Yemchuk said of the annual folk ritual that takes place on January 13 and 14 each year. Her photo book (published by Patrick Frey Editions), named after the celebration, depicts the bitter chill, the freezing fog and the low winter sun, as villagers of the rural Ukrainian town, dressed in bright and brilliant embroidered textiles, masks and costumes, come together to say farewell to the season as springtime looms.
“There are so few places in the world that still value and hold on to ancient traditions,” Yemchuk says. “I think it’s so important that we hold on to these spiritual and mystical traditions, these stories of the past. We need them as individuals and as societies to stay in touch with our spirits of the past and present, to have some magic in our lives. It’s so sacred.”
Yelena Yemchuk’s Malanka is published by Patrick Frey Editions and is available to order here now.
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Combining archival and found photography with his own imagery, photographer Inuuteq Storch – the first Kaalaleq (Arctic Inuit) artist to have a solo exhibition at the Venice Biennale (2024) – documents everyday life under the dramatic Greenlandic skies. Where urban photography often shows the impact of human activity as triumphant over nature, Storch’s photography depicts architecture and human figures as smaller than Mother Nature, whose changing moods direct the day. “We live because of nature, it decides what kind of day we are going to have,” Storch told Dazed.
Read the full story here.
Adam Rouhana, Before Freedom12 Images
In his series Before Freedom, the Boston-born Palestinian photographer Adam Rouhana captures what is circumstantially forgotten in the framing of Palestine: the quiet, natural dignity of everyday life. Rouhana’s images – children playing in water, families surrounded by nature, people enjoying the fruits of once-abundant farmlands, a rearing horse – affirm that to live, to exist in communion with the land, to laugh, to raise children, and to seek peace is profoundly human.
The first image in the show is of children splashing in shallow waters. It evokes the universal innocence of summer afternoons, a memory anyone might carry from childhood. Yet here, such moments unfold against the backdrop of occupation, under siege, within a war zone. “Palestine was, […] before Israel’s occupation, an open-border, culturally-pluralist, religiously diverse, fertile homeland – our homeland,” Rouhana reminds us. While rising up against violent colonialism and genocide, Rouhana’s photographs also defy the flattening of Palestinian identity into tragedy alone: they insist on life, on joy, on continuity, on resistance. “To show my photos of Palestine now,” he told Dazed, “is to say: we are here, in Palestine – and we’re not going anywhere.”
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Daniel Jack Lyons, Like A River (2022)18 Images
Artist and anthropologist Daniel Jack Lyons’ photo book Like a River (published by Loose Joints), documents the marginalised teenagers growing up in Brazil’s Amazon rainforest. Like a River amplifies and empowers the trans and queer communities of the region. Lyons explores how the intersection of deep indigenous traditions and identity politics meet in the lush canopies and vegetation of the rainforest and the toxic mess of environmental degradation, violence and discrimination. “It’s a space that accentuates the seemingly reckless courage of youth to live in truth, in spite of the relentless pressure to submit and conform,” he told Dazed. “I think the biggest distinction is that this is all happening within a larger context centred on illegal mining, massive deforestation, and the Bolsonaro regime’s environmental and social policies, rooted in climate change denial and white supremacy.”
Like A River by Daniel Jack Lyons is published by Loose Joints.
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Marcus Riggs, Again, again, I rise (2020)13 Images
Celebrating the fortitude of the human spirit, Berlin-based photographer Marcus Riggs draws inspiration from Maya Angelou’s poem “Still I Rise” to create a photo series that celebrates the power of self-love, resistance, healing, and quiet defiance. Captured across a range of landscapes, from serene lily ponds and dense green forests to arid desert expanses, the series portrays bodies communing with their environment and one another in gestures of tenderness and resilience. The series was conceived amid the collective turmoil of 2020 – a year marked by isolation, political unrest, and police brutality. “I wanted to shoot something that brought me a sense of calmness, taking it back to a very basic foundation that we all are connected to in some way or another, nature and the naked human body,” he told Dazed. The images unfold in a carefully considered sequence: beginning with the emergence of a woman from inky water, as if birthed by the earth itself, and ending with a man at rest in a sparse, textured landscape, surrendering to the quiet power of nature. Riggs ends, quite poignantly: “Through all of the pain we may have endured thus far and will continue to endure collectively, we will also continue to rise and rise again.”
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Gleeson Paulino: Echoes Of The Amazon15 Images
Gleeson Paulino’s evocative photos of indigenous communities in the Amazon rainforest offer an alternative perspective of the social, cultural and environmental impact of the climate crisis. Paulino’s vibrant portrayals of abundant landscapes, people and animals, all coexisting harmoniously, transport us to a place rife with beauty. Echoes of the Amazon invokes an emotional response that statistics and words might fail to do. They bid for humanity and the reignition of an educative desire to learn more about the people and places who are primarily affected by exploitative ‘evolution’. “Photography has the power to awaken empathy, to pause someone for just a second longer, and maybe even to inspire care and action,” Paulino told Dazed previously. “I’m documenting real people and real moments, but I’m also chasing something more intangible – an energy, a lingering atmosphere.”
Read the full story here.