Ian Berry’s Water gathers photographs made across fifteen years of travel, tracing the inseparable relationships among water, landscape and human life. Published by GOST Books in 2023, the book turns a fundamental element into the organizing subject of a wide-ranging documentary project. Its concern is not water as an isolated natural spectacle, but the ways communities depend upon it, confer meaning on it, alter it and suffer its extremes.
Berry moves between sharply contrasting circumstances. Hindus bathe in the Ganges, while shellfish gatherers work along the Spanish coast. In Baku, polluted water surrounds oil infrastructure; in Greenland, fishermen navigate an ocean reshaped by melting ice. Drought reduces South African landscapes to dust, and flooding transforms Bangladeshi villages into islands. Together, these scenes connect ritual and livelihood with extraction, contamination and environmental disruption, showing how abundance and scarcity can be equally consequential.
The book is neither presented as a comprehensive survey nor conceived as an overt political argument. Berry instead selects memorable stories from his assignments, allowing observed lives and places to carry the larger implications. This approach gives the work its particular tension: the photographs remain grounded in specific encounters, yet their accumulation points toward the instability intensified by climate change. Water appears as sustenance and threat, a source of community and a measure of ecological vulnerability.
For collectors of documentary photography and long-form photojournalism, Water deserves attention as a sustained body of work rather than a collection built around a loose motif. Its fifteen-year span and geographic breadth permit comparison across cultures without dissolving the individuality of each situation. The 180-page hardcover provides substantial space for this extended inquiry, bringing Berry’s global assignments into a single, coherent account of how one essential resource shapes both everyday existence and an uncertain future.
