Waste not, want not

Daniel Nelson

Syngenta Photography Award

Image by Syngenta/ Somerset House

That statement on a wall of the exhibition ‘Scarcity-Waste’ at Somerset House provides the focus for this year’s Syngenta Photography Award.

More stats from the organisers:

·         Over 800 million people go to bed hungry, while others are throwing away over half the food they buy

·         China has lost over 27,000 rivers in the last 60 years

·         Retailers chuck 1.6 million tons of food a year because it doesn’t meet their requirements for size and appearance

·         Water scarcity is estimated to affect up to one-third of the world’s population

Do the photographs convey the variety and size of global waste? No – how could they? The problem is far too big, almost out of control. A picture may be worth 1,000 words, but often they need a caption to convey the message. A striking image of a dead giraffe, for example, but we need to be told it’s a victim of drought.

Many of the photos used tried and tested techniques, such as massive repetition (a car is ordinary, but thousands parked head-to-tail shouts ‘consumption’), juxtaposition (an English suburban street over which looms a 40-feet high waste mountain), incongruity (a Buddha’s head in a coal yard), and humans in strange situations – or just strange humans.

Nevertheless, the photographers have come up with pictures that please and amuse, make you think, and occasionally encapsulate particular manifestations of pressure on resources, poverty and mass consumption, garbage, pollution and degradation.

The winners include Rasel Chowdhury of Bangladesh, for his series on “Desperate urbanization” based on the degradation of the Buriganga river.

Benedikt Partenheimer’s pictures of air pollution in China also speak of desperation, and, indeed, death, (timely because an Internet sensation, a documentary on the subject, has just been removed from some Chinese websites) but this show highlights a global not a poor world issue.

·         The Syngenta Photography Award: Scarcity-Waste is at Somerset House, The Strand, WC2, until 10 April, free, 10am-6pm. Info:  7845 4600/  info@somersethouse.org.uk