Welcome to Rio Tinto Land
Rivers with scarlet-red waters and orange-hued lands reminiscent of Mars? Welcome to the Rio Tinto mining basin, where the landscapes seem straight out of a science fiction novel. At the foot of the Andalusian hills, the scenery shaped by the mining industry has become a boon for tourism. With huge excavations presented as “handmade landscapes” and the bright red waters of the Rio Tinto (the “Red River”) tinged with metallic pollution, these ecological disasters have been transformed by the authorities into a tourist attraction celebrating mining. Visitors can, for example, undertake a “Martian expedition” to observe the similarities with the Red Planet. This distracts from the ecological and health threats posed by the industry, especially as mining activity is experiencing a resurgence here and elsewhere in the world.
A story about how the mining industry imagines its social utility despite its environmental and social consequences. This is an essential question as digital and energy transitions have ushered humanity into a new mining era: Geologist Marieke Van Lichtervelde points out, “We will extract as much metal in the next thirty years as humanity has extracted to date.”
Paul Lemaire
Paul Lemaire is a 33-year-old documentary photographer from the French Alps. After earning an engineering degree, he left this field in 2019 to document the impact of human activities on the environment and local populations. In 2020, he graduated from EMI-CFD, directed by Guillaume Herbaut and Julien Daniel, and co-founded the photojournalist collective Hors Format. Since then, he has focused on two long-term projects: the first on the collapse of biodiversity in West Africa, particularly due to the expansion of cocoa production, and the second on the materiality of digital technology. A photographer and editor, his work has been published in Le Monde, Médiapart, Le Parisien, Libération, and more. A 2024 recipient of the Fondation des Treilles, his photo projects have also been selected for the New Environmental Writing Prize at La Gacilly, the 2024 Photojournalism
Exhibition presented free of charge in the 1912 Building of La Pulperie.
Exhibition presented within the framework of the Zoom Photo Festival Saguenay.
For more information on the Zoom Photo Festival Saguenay, consult the zoomphotofestival.ca
