For ten years Giulio Di Sturco followed the Ganges, travelling from its Himalayan source through the Indian plains to the delta in the Bay of Bengal. The photographs gathered in Ganga Ma record what pollution, industrialisation, and a shifting climate have done to a river that is at once a waterway, a working resource, and a sacred presence for hundreds of millions of people. Di Sturco works along the whole length of that contradiction, attending to the river’s ritual and economic life as closely as to its degradation, so the book resists the single declarative image in favour of accumulation and sequence.

The project has been recognised through a Getty Images Editorial Grant in 2014, first place in the climate category of the International Photography Grant in 2018, and inclusion in exhibitions tied to the Sony World Photography Awards 2015 and the LensCulture Exposure Awards 2018 at Somerset House, London. The book was published by GOST Books in 2019 as a 136-page hardback, with accompanying texts by the environmental activist and author Vandana Shiva and the curator Eimear Martin. Those essays give the photographs a second register, placing the river’s condition within arguments about ecology, development, and belief rather than leaving the imagery to carry the subject alone.

For a collector, the book’s interest lies in the span of the undertaking and in how that span is edited. A decade along one river produces a body of work whose meaning depends on pacing, recurrence, and the slow recognition of change; the sequence, not any individual frame, is the argument. Di Sturco’s attention holds together the sacred and the industrial without resolving one into the other, and the resulting tension is what distinguishes Ganga Ma from more ephemeral documentary responses to environmental crisis. It is a considered record of a place under pressure, and a photographer working at the scale his subject demands.