The upcoming book Ganga Ma (GOST, June 2019) is the result of Giulio Di Sturco’s ten-year photographic journey along the Ganges. The project follows the river for over 2500 miles, documenting the effects of pollution, industrialization and climate change.
When Di Sturco began documenting the Ganges in 2007, he found a river on the brink of a humanitarian crisis and ecological disaster. For Di Sturco, the river became a metaphor for humankind’s conflicted approach to the natural world, simultaneously revered and desecrated.
“The photographs in the book combine an aesthetic, painterly response to the complexion and atmosphere of the Ganges with elements of the observational detachment of documentary photography,” states GOST in the press release.
Curator Eimear Martin writes in Ganga Ma, “In contrast to the sensory onslaught typical of the myriad exoticizing images used to ‘sell’ India—bustling bazaars in kaleidoscopic hues, vertiginous throngs congregating on embankments—Di Sturco offers a perspective of quietude and restraint. Landscapes are barren, desolate, and strangely depopulated, a mood further enhanced by the use of startlingly simple compositions and desaturated colors.”
Many of India’s holy sites stand along the banks of the Ganges, where purification ceremonies, bathing and other customs including entrusting the dead to the river, take place. It is also one of the most polluted rivers in the world, its toxicity and shrinking water levels, endangering the livelihoods of more than 400 million people and decimating countless species.
For Hindus, the Ganges, known as Ganga Ma (Mother Ganges) is the epicenter of spirituality—a physical manifestation of a goddess and a purifier of sins.
In this vein, Di Sturco says of his photographic process, “The main character of my story is a non-human entity: a river. I decided to treat it as a human being and create a flow that would document the river as if I was documenting the life of a person.”
Ganga Ma
By Giulio Di Sturco
Texts by Dr. Vandana Shiva and Eimear Martin
GOST, June 2019 (available for pre-sale now)
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