The Rivers Melt
(2017-2020)
At the intersection of nature, history, political ideology and environmentalism, this photo essay documents the European Green Belt which exists along the former Iron Curtain borderlands from the Barents Sea above Norway to the Black Sea coast of Bulgaria.
For nearly five decades the Iron Curtain borderlands were out-of-bounds to civilians, dividing the European East from West. During the Cold War it was a death trap to humans. But amongst the traces of conflict and occupation, the no-man’s land enabled wildlife to flourish.
Today much of the route is connected through national parks and nature reserves. It is a vast corridor that bisects the European continent from north to south, and these photographs are an uncanny, yet hopeful, documentation of places where wildlife has reclaimed the land and become a symbol of cross-border collaboration and peace-keeping.
This photo essay was created with support from The Royal Photographic Society Environmental Bursary.
Norway ~ Finland ~ Estonia ~ Latvia ~ Lithuania ~ Poland ~ Germany ~ Czech Republic ~ Austria ~ Italy ~ Slovenia ~ Slovakia ~ Hungary ~ Romania ~ Bulgaria ~ Greece
