On Monday The New Yorker Magazine published a series of photos taken along the Yangtze River by photographer Mustafah Abdulaziz.
Caption: Boats trawling for seaweed and shrimp. Honghu, China, 2015.
Credit line: Mustafah Abdulaziz / WWF-UK
Peter Hessler introduces the photos:
Approximately one of every fifteen people on earth lives in the watershed of the Yangtze. At moments, Abdulaziz felt as if each of these four hundred and fifty million individuals were interfacing with the river in a completely different way. “There’s no agreed format,” he told me. “With the Ganges, there was a commonality, with the spiritual aspect of how people interact with the river. In China, I didn’t feel that. It’s trading. People are trading on some aspect of the river.” In Abdulaziz’s images, there are fishermen and poachers, conservationists and polluters, huge transport ships and tiny sampans as slender and slight as river reeds. There are shots taken from the steel decks of luxury liners, where tourists stand with their heads cocked at angles of forty-five degrees. “The people aren’t looking at the Yangtze,” Abdulaziz said. “They’re looking up, not down. They’re not really experiencing the river.”
For a fascinating glimpse of life along the Yangtze, check out all the photos.
Image credit: The New Yorker
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