ONCE the fourth-largest freshwater lake in the world, the Aral Sea has now shrunk from 68,000 square kilometres to just 10 per cent of its former size.
Photographer travelled to the Republic of Karakalpakstan, an autonomous region of Uzbekistan where the southern part of the lake is. She has documented those living in the area in her picture series The Land Beyond The River, taking elegant portraits and vibrant landscapes.
Soviet-era agricultural policies, including the diversion of rivers to irrigate a vast cotton monoculture, choked the lake’s water supply and led to livelihoods such as fishing being obliterated, while the loss of much of the lake changed the climate. But many Karakalpak people “choose to stay on their land and preserve their traditions, their unique culture and their language, which I find truly inspiring”, says Varaksina. The above shows abandoned ships at sunset in what was once part of the Aral Sea, but is now a desert.
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A shipwreck window (above) reveals a cow grazing on what used to be the lake bed, while the main image at the top of the piece is a portrait of a lone fisherman catching Artemia (a primitive arthropod also known as brine shrimp). High salinity in much of what is left of the lake doesn’t allow any other life to exist.
The above image shows school girls by an art installation on the former southern shore in Muynak, once a port town. This imagines how things used to look, in what is now desert.
The rough location of the lake’s shoreline in 1960, outlined faintly in black, is seen in a satellite image from NASA.
