Chloe Dewe Mathews “Caspian: The Elements”

Aperture Gallery

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Essays by Morad Montazami, Sean O’Hagan, and Arnold van Bruggen

“Dewe Mathews’s images portray ordinary lives caught up in the surge to modernity that oil, the most potent natural resource, has precipitated across the Caspian region. Sooner than we think, these images will become historical, a record of a place that no longer exists in quite the same way, but that nevertheless thrives against all the odds in a time when, in much of the world, the age of miracles has passed into myth.”
—Sean O’Hagan

Between 2010 and 2015, British photographer Chloe Dewe Mathews traveled through the five countries surrounding the Caspian Sea: Kazakhstan, Azerbaijan, Turkmenistan, Russia, and Iran. In images that range from stark and elemental to lush and mysterious, Dewe Mathews recorded the vastly diverse peoples, politics, and geography of Central Asia, centering always on the great inland sea. In this resource-rich area, often roiled by contested geopolitics, Dewe Mathews found that materials like oil, fire, uranium, and water are integral to the mystical, economic, artistic, religious, and therapeutic aspects of daily life.

Caspian: The Elements is divided into three photographic essays—“Oil, Gas, Fire,” “Rock, Salt, Uranium,” and “Water”—each introduced by a distinguished writer. Dewe Mathews’s luminous photographs offer intimate portraits and dramatic landscapes that explore the ways in which humans are inextricably linked to this enigmatic and much-coveted land.