In An Elegy for the Death of Hamun, Iranian photographer Hashem Shakeri turns his lens toward a haunting portrait of ecological and human devastation.
The series captures the arid ruins of Sīstān, once nourished by the great Hamun Lake—now a desolate stretch of land swallowed by drought and governmental neglect. Once the lifeblood of southeastern Iran, this vanished body of water once supported an ancient civilization and a lush biosphere. Shakeri’s images, drained of water and of color, mirror a terrain in withdrawal—a land bereft not only of sustenance but of memory.
Shakeri’s approach, steeped in the poetics of absence, renders the environmental collapse as both literal and symbolic. Shot on medium format, the photographs are quiet and deliberate, echoing the stillness of a land that has lost its voice. The aridity of the beige landscape is not simply a climatic condition but a visual elegy, where each frame bears the residue of vanished livelihoods—fishermen without rivers, farmers without fields, animals without sustenance. The emptiness is profound and affective; one feels the desolation not just through what is seen, but through what is no longer visible.
This devastation, however, is not an accident of nature alone. Shakeri deftly points to the layered complexities of cross-border politics, particularly the strained water rights dispute between Iran and Afghanistan over the Helmand River, as well as internal mismanagement. His project becomes, in this way, an act of resistance—documenting a catastrophe ignored or obscured by policy and bureaucracy. The photographs bear witness to a region slowly being extinguished by forces beyond its control, where aquifers and communities alike have been drained.
Now in the grips of its worst drought year, Sīstān teeters on the edge of erasure. Shakeri’s camera, however, refuses to let it disappear unnoticed. His photographs are a quiet archive of resilience and erasure, where each image mourns not only a lake, but a people silenced by political indifference and environmental ruin. In their stillness, they demand that we look—and listen.
