Hard Rain

Today is the last day for outdoors photo exhibition "Hard Rain" on Storgatan (= main street) here in Luleå.

The man behind the project is Mark Edwards, a photographer who specializes in the environment. He has chosen the images for the exhibition, one for each line in the Bob Dylan song "A Hard Rain´s A-Gonna Fall", an idea that came to him some years ago in the Sahara desert, a story he tells in this interview.

There have been popular guided tours, and much interest, and now the exhibition is moving on. I´m not sure where it´s going, but it´s been on tour in Sweden since 2011.

I remember these two from one of the books by Mark Lynas, who photographed a glacier in Peru that his father had photographed 23 years before. I never actually read the book, but it was all over the Swedish press at the time, and I definitely had it on a reading-list that I must have misplaced.

These images next to each other gives one an eerie feeling of doom and opportunities lost, I think, even though they are on display to inspire commitment and a will to do what it takes to make a change.

Artist Karin Mamma Andersson said about some of her paintings that she feels that we live in an age of rot, or a global state of doldrums. This exhibition does make you fear what storms may be ahead. I think the last picture looks like a Gustave Doré version of hell.

These photos are nowhere near being the worst ones. Some are really horrific, with a rotting body on a beach next to a tourist attraction, dead or half-dead women and children, families living in sewers with hardly a rag to cover themselves. Perhaps I should have taken snaps of them, but honestly, when I got to that part, I simply forgot to use my camera.