“Ressac” is documenting life around the ever-disappearing Aral Sea, with four trips from 2008 to 2013, in Kazakhstan and Ouzbekistan. The exhibition will show colour and B&W handmade silver prints and a video documenting the return to the sea of a old fisherman and a young kid 25 years after the seaside has disappeared from their village.
In the 1960s, the Soviet Union decided to turn Uzbekistan into one large cotton farm, breaking the largest river in Central Asia, the Amu Darya, into irrigation canals. This was the beginning of an ecological disaster.
The flow of the river was not strong enough to supply one of the world’s largest inland seas, the Aral sea, which shrunk inexorably. The water receded away from the fishing villages, its salinity increased such that its brackish water fish could no longer survive. The population diminished. The climate changed: once temperate, it became continental. The air filled with dust and respiratory disease became rampant.
Today the Aral Sea is nothing more than a large lake. Near the border of Uzbekistan and Kazakhstan, a dam was built between 2003 and 2005. The Kazakh part of the Aral Sea, still fed by the Syr Darya river, returned to life. One sea, two worlds, which Grégoire Eloy explored during four trips in 2008, 2009, 2012 and 2013.
Read the full article on the French version of Le Journal.
Grégoire Eloy was born in 1971 in Cannes. After studying economy and finance and holding a corporate job, he devotes himself to photography since 2003. He worked as an assistant for Stanley Greene between 2003 and 2005. His first photographic project, resulting from a journey on Europe’s new borders during Fall 2003, won the Photographie.com ‘Talent Reportage’ Grant in 2004. Since 2003, he has been working on the Former Soviet Union and Central Asia, on topics linked with space, memory and the Soviet legacy. More recently, he worked in Georgia and around the Aral Sea.
His series on displaced people in the South Caucasus, Forgotten by the Pipeline (Les Oubliés du pipeline), was the subject of a book published by Images Plurielles in 2008, with the support of Amnesty International. Since 2010, he also collaborates with F93, a scientific and technical cultural centre, on science related projects, notably for his series Ether, shot in astrophysics laboratories.
Ressac
Photographs by Grégoire Eloy
From June 1st to July 27th, 2013
12 boulevard des Filles du Calvaire
75011 Paris
France
+ 33 (0) 1 58 30 89 70
[email protected]
Tuesday – Saturday 12pm – 7pm
