On 9th February, around 90 Cambridge university students from a range of disciplines attended the documentary presentation ‘Hard Rain: Our Headlong Collision with Nature‘, in the third of a series of events organised by student-led network the Cambridge Hub.
The brainchild of globally-travelled photographer Mark Edwards, the Hard Rain Project comprises, in addition to the presentation, a book, a film, a variety of workshops and an exhibition which has attracted 15 million visitors in 50 countries around the world and is just about to open in Kew and Edinburgh.
The presentation included a slideshow of 200 images from places as far flung as the Sahara Desert, Greenland, Haiti and Bangladesh, all played over the soundtrack of Bob Dylan’s famous 1962 protest song, A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall. Mark Edwards then gave a talk from his standpoint “not as an expert but as a witness” of human poverty and environmental disaster around the world.
Edwards told the story of the background to the Hard Rain Project, a personal journey which began for him in 1969. At the time of the Apollo Moon landings when everybody else was watching the historic moment on television, he was lost in the Sahara Desert. The nomadic tribesmen who rescued him happened to have a cassette player and a Bob Dylan tape which included the song Hard Rain.
Struck by the shared humanity that he encountered, Edwards began to reflect on the need to focus on the relationships between people on this planet rather than reaching out into space, and conceived the idea of a photographic project which would illustrate each line of Bob Dylan’s song, combining the “transformative power of poetry” with the “urgency of photography”.
A Bangladeshi man carries his cholera-stricken wife (Calcutta, 1971). © Mark Edwards / Still Pictures
The images in the slideshow are powerful, some beautiful, others disturbing and some a bit of both. There is an Arctic fox leaping from one lump of ice to another, a melting glacier that looks like a weeping face, the sacrifice of a goat during a Voodoo ceremony in an impoverished Haitian community, burning forests and children working on refuse tips. But there is hope as well, as shown in images of solar farms in Africa and children wearing brand new school uniforms in spite of the rubbish and dirt that surrounds them, looking ahead to the future. Edwards says, “For a photographer, every picture has a before and after…. Sustainable development is happening and it’s not just for show.”
Inadvertently publicised in Ireland as a talk by Bob Dylan himself, “Hard Rain” drew crowds of people with guitars and ended in a spontaneous jamming session. Accidental and amusing though it is, this anecdote is nonetheless very much in keeping with the spirit of co-operation advocated by Edwards, who re-iterated his key message – the importance of recognising the interconnection between people across the world, and between people and nature. “There is no us and them,” he says, in an appeal to move away from Stone Age impulses that have outlived their usefulness and are damaging, rather than enhancing, our chances of survival. “Can you suspend nationalism and just be human?”
The presentation received mixed reviews from those present. While some found it powerful and moving, others found the tone patronising and felt that the use of the images and music exploited the emotions at the expense of hard facts.
The best thing to do is to find out for yourself. Visit www.hardrainproject.com
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By Anne French ~ 18 February 2011
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Links
Cambridge Hub’s Lent series is designed to facilitate students’ engagement with ‘key social, environmental and development issues.’ To find out about upcoming events, visit http://cambridgehub.org/series
