Behind the lens: Ships of the desert

It’s been said that if every scientist who had visited Uzbekistan’s Aral Sea over the past 50 years had brought with them a bucket of water, then the sea would be full once again - but sadly, it isn’t.

Once the world’s largest inland sea spread across the Uzbekistan and Kazakhstan borders, today, the Aral is just a puddle compared to what it once was. In the 1960s, the Soviet Union launched a large scale project to divert the main sources of the Aral’s inflowing water, the Syr Darya river in the north and the Amu Darya in the south, with the hope of supporting vast cotton crops throughout Central Asia. The project failed.

As the Aral Sea dried up, fisheries and the communities that depended on them collapsed. The increasingly salty water became polluted with fertiliser and pesticides. The blowing dust from the exposed lakebed, contaminated with agricultural chemicals, became a public health hazard.

I first heard of the Aral Sea when I was in my early 20s, and as a young aspiring photographer drawn to places I thought would challenge me to take better images, I decided to visit in 2015.

To get here, a local taxi driver took my friend and I in his clapped-out car along dusty empty roads from the town of Nukus, in the country’s west, to Moy’noq, a once thriving town previously on the edge of the sea and home to a fish canning factory. The place was dead. We roused a weary museum attendant who pulled out a handful of keys and unlocked the front door of the local museum for us to poke around. I peered into dusty cabinets and studied wall displays documenting the visits of experts over the years tasked with resolving the ecological disaster.

With travel photography I always try to seek out a human element, as for me travel is about people and culture. But here, there simply wasn’t anyone around, just the rusting ships and a few cows that watched us warily as I framed up the ships while the wind blew.