Will our children inherit only dust? That is the question Nick Brandt poses in his exhibition of photography works at Custot Gallery, Dubai. A mighty elephant stands tall but at his feet is a sea of rubble and destruction. Brandt took the image of the animal in its native East Africa and then created a billboard of the photograph and placed it in an urbanising area to emphasise the catastrophic consequences of human development on the habitat of wild animals.
The gallery is filled with similarly striking images. A chimpanzee seems to nestle down in a gulley full of waste and a proud lion stands, overlooking a quarry canyon, dug where the pride lands once rolled.
They are heartbreaking scenes that do make you question what kind of future we are leaving for our children. The sheer scale of environmental damage is made more than clear.
But there is a flip side. The alternative for the people living in East Africa is poverty and slums. Western colonisation and industrialisation left a similar wave of damage in its wake, so who are we to sit in ivory towers and cast judgement down upon these people for also striving for a better life?
The question is, what is a better life? The problem is at the core of current human existence where we put such emphasis on consumption that we are driven to destroying our planet.
There is no denying the power of these images to stir up debate. To see more visit Custot Gallery, Alserkal Avenue, Dubai. Inherit the Dust runs until February 28.
