Human Tides.
An ongoing photographic project, Human Tides is a document of humanity’s seeds, scars and footprints. Humanity drifts around the globe, sometimes as a direct result of a catastrophic event such as Chernobyl, or from a more orderly ebb and flow over five hundred years due to gradually changing commercial circumstances such as Timbuktu.
Workers in a makeshift laundry in an Abidjan river are mostly immigrants from Burkina Faso. This could be the early seed of a new colony, or a flickering flame soon to be extinguished. Thousands of inland Bangladeshi farm workers who can no longer feed a family move to the coast to work in the ship recycle yards. They either move back to the countryside with a new skill set, or their families join them on the coast. The Grande Mosque in Djenne or Chorsu Bazaar in Tashkent speak of a much more important place in the world than current circumstances would have you believe.
With the rising and falling fortunes come changes to political positions. Monuments such as the Friendship of Nations Arch in Kiev may have seemed like a good idea in 1978 to repair bad feelings between Ukraine and Russia from Soviet times, but seem absurd today after only 40 years.
These human tides are continuing all around us, some sudden and some over a thousand years, an ever-changing landscape of language, politics, religion and commerce.
Images on website are low res to suit mobile devices.
All photographs are taken on Fuji Negative film.
Cameras used are medium format 6x9 and 5x4, and large format 10x8.