Aperture Magazine’s Spring issue brings together photographers who contemplate nature’s fragile beauty and its ever-changing relationship to humanity. From the ancient forests of California to the dwindling coasts of Mexico, from the Japanese island of Teshima to the oases of Tunisia, from India’s sacred Nilgiri forest to the parched landscapes of Iran, “The End of Nature?” offers a sweeping yet intimate look at how nature is entwined with our lives in ways that are both mysterious and profoundly urgent.
The issue takes its title from Bill McKibben’s 1989 manifesto The End of Nature, the first mainstream book about climate change. McKibben argued not that nature was ending, but that its meanings were changing—that climate change had begun to shatter a collective illusion that nature was something separate from our species, and to diminish our false sense of permanency around the natural world. With those concepts in mind, this issue tries to visualize how the world’s deep, ancient rhythms have begun to shift under the weight of a climate we’ve inadvertently shaped.
The poet Dan Beachy-Quick profiles Mitch Epstein, whose majestic photographs of the United States’ imperiled old-growth forests stand as a summation of his decades-long project of documenting the altered American landscape. Eva Díaz explores the unfulfilled promise of the astronaut William Anders’s Earthrise image, a photograph that sparked environmental consciousness even as it remains shrouded in misconceptions. Ian Bourland draws our attention to the dark depths of extractive capitalism, exploring how the history of American photography was forged in the mines.
The issue’s artist portfolios share stories from the front lines of the climate crisis, picturing its stakes with empathy and nuance. In Mexico, César Rodríguez documents life and loss in Mexico’s flooded fishing towns, embracing light leaks and other analog imperfections. Gayatri Ganju embeds with the Indigenous Kurumba people of Tamil Nadu, listening to their stories about the endangered ancestral forest they call home. M’hammed Kilito and Michael Schmelling chronicle bygone utopias within North Africa’s desert oases and California’s radical back-to-the-land communities, respectively. Rinko Kawauchi takes small moments in the Japanese landscape and finds in them a universe, full of rapt attention and stillness, while Lucas Foglia charts the intertwined movements of painted lady butterflies and migrants across Europe, Africa, and the Middle East.
On the cover is an image by Hashem Shakeri, a Tehran-based photographer whose work focuses on environmental degradation and its impact on marginalized communities in Iran. His ongoing series The Kahur Does Not Fall Unless the Earth Wills It portrays everyday life in the drought-stricken wetlands of Balochistan, an impoverished province spanning Pakistan, Afghanistan, and Iran. For Shakeri, the region’s resilient kahur tree is a testament to the beauty that persists in a place of much suffering—a vivid symbol of “the stubborn will to live under the most unforgiving conditions.”
