The captivating images exhibit a “staged version” of nature

A Maasai man looks at the Kenya National Reserve Maasai Mara. But it is not a virgin desert: behind him the remains of a “experience of champagne picnic” for tourists.

“Tourists pay the privilege of reconstructing a scene from a colonial film,” explains photographer Zed Nelson. “The Maasai warrior is paid to add authenticity to the scene.” The image is part of the Nelson series Anthropocene illusionwho earned him a photographer of the year at Sony World Photography Prize last month and appears in a new Book of the same name. Nelson went to 14 countries to create the series, which shows how, while the world sinks deeper into the environmental crisis, a version managed by the proliferative nature.

In another photo of the series, spectators observe a whale shark in the kingdom of the chimelong ocean in ChinaThe largest aquarium in the world (photo above). “It is a huge creature with a huge range in its natural habitat, which raises serious questions about the ethics of keeping it there,” explains Nelson. In the photo below, a snow cannon produces artificial snow in a ski resort in the Dolomite mountains in Italy. Approximately 90% of Italian ski resorts are now based on snow Stay open.

“The series is, in essence, on the way in which we have divorced the natural world and we are destroying it,” explains Nelson. “He examines how an artificial version of nature has proliferated – I would say to hide from ourselves what we have done and satisfy our desire for communion with nature.”