My last photo blog on Green Prophet featured one of the many sites in the Hajar Mountains from which construction aggregate is extracted. This time I’m showing a different kind of mountain on the outskirts of Dubai. This is a landfill for building rubble.
The theme for this series of photographs is ‘consumption’ and we don’t often think of buildings and city infrastructure as being things we consume, but of course they are.
The functional lifespan may be somewhat longer than a typical take-away meal or cheap item of clothing, but in Dubai, not by very much it would seem.
So the excavated mountainside previously depicted, after a short life as a building, bridge or road, eventually ends up, once again, as a mountain, of sorts.
You can view the site on google earth at 25°10’45.30″N 55°27’22.58″E
Note from the editor: this photograph is part of a series called “Consumption” that seeks to document consumerism’s impact on the environment. From resource extraction and commodity production all the way down the supply chain to retail stores and waste processing facilities, Richard artfully examines what nature has come to mean in a world that depends on buying stuff.
Author: Richard Allenby Pratt
Richard is a British photographer living and working in Dubai, UAE. His concerns about the sustainability of the way we live and our economic systems only really became urgent after the birth of his son in 2008. As a landscape photographer he found the obvious way to express these concerns was by making photographs of the places impacted on by human activity, and particularly those places that best display the terrifying scale of our consumption. His basic method is to study google earth and then visit the most intriguing and inexplicable places thereby discovered.
