THE LAND REMEMBERS

Land remembers what people forget. Across Central Anatolia, water is disappearing, yet its traces remain in the earth, abandoned machines, old photographs, and human memory. The Land Remembers explores what remains as a familiar landscape vanishes.

THE LAND REMEMBERS

Land remembers what people forget.

Across Central Anatolia, water is disappearing from landscapes that have sustained life for generations. Lakes retreat, wetlands shrink, groundwater falls, and sinkholes open across agricultural plains. Yet the traces of what once existed remain in the marks left by water on the earth, in abandoned structures, in obsolete farming machinery, in old photographs, and in the memories of those who have spent their lives on this land. The Land Remembers is a long-term documentary project about environmental change, but also about memory. I began by photographing the visible effects of drought and water loss. Over time, I realised the story could not be told through the landscape alone. It was also held by people who remember a different landscape. An elderly woman holds a photograph of herself working in the wheat fields when she was young. In a village coffeehouse, older men sit beneath an image of the surrounding landscape when water was still abundant. Inside an abandoned building, an old wheat machine remains where it was once used. These fragments of the past exist alongside a very different agricultural present: irrigated fields, water-intensive crops, and wells drawing groundwater from beneath increasingly dry soil. The project moves between aerial landscapes and intimate human encounters, between what can be measured and what can only be remembered. Seen from above, disappearing water leaves forms that can appear unexpectedly beautiful. On the ground, those same changes become part of everyday life, embedded in work, ageing villages, and the relationship between generations. The photographs do not attempt to reduce this transformation to a single cause. Climate change, prolonged drought, groundwater extraction, and shifting agricultural practices intersect in a region where water has become increasingly fragile. I am interested in what remains when a familiar landscape begins to disappear. A photograph survives on a wall. A machine remains in an abandoned room. A woman remembers the fields of her youth. Young people stand at the edge of the water and look toward a landscape they will inherit. The land remembers too. Its former waters remain as lines, scars, and mineral traces. Its surface collapses into sinkholes. Lakes become exposed earth. In places once shaped by water, its absence leaves traces of its own. What we are witnessing is not only the disappearance of water, but the gradual disappearance of a landscape as it has been remembered.