Caspian: The Elements is Chloe Dewe Mathews’s record of five years spent roaming the borderlands of the Caspian Sea. In a resource-rich region roiled by contested geopolitics, Dewe Mathews found that elemental materials like oil, rock, and uranium are central to the mystical, practical, artistic, religious, and therapeutic aspects of daily life. With essays by Morad Montazami, Sean O’Hagan, and Arnold van Bruggen, Caspian: The Elements offers a series of powerful visual narratives that explore the deep links between the peoples of the Caspian and their enigmatic and coveted landscapes.
Chloe Dewe Mathews (born in London, 1982) is an artist, photographer, and filmmaker based in St. Leonards-on-Sea, England. She is the recipient of the Robert Gardner Fellowship in Photography from Harvard University’s Peabody Museum of Archaeology & Ethnology. Her work has been published in the Guardian and Financial Times and has been exhibited at the Tate Modern and British Library, London; Irish Museum of Modern Art, Dublin; and Staatliche Kunstsammlungen, Dresden.
“In Caspian British documentary photographer Chloe Dewe Matthews delves deep into the landscapes and people of the Caspian Sea. Using the region’s rich natural resources – oil, rock, uranium – she explores the religious traditions and communal practices, including bathing in crude oil, that endure in an area more often defined by its contested geopolitics.”―Sean O’Hagan, The Guardian, Best Books of 2018, Photography category
Hardcover
216 pages
36.5 x 19.5cm