Rising Waters

Ed Burtynsky and Lois Conner: Photographing China’s Three Gorges Dam Region

February 11 - March 10, 2005, Carleton College Art Gallery

Lois Conner Lecture - Thursday March 3, Boliou Auditorium 104, 8 pm

The Three Gorges Dam, on a rugged and beautiful stretch of the Yangtze River in China, is the largest hydroelectric engineering project in the world. Begun in 1993, the project is scheduled for completion in 2009. Even before the waters began to rise in 2003, the countryside and lives of the inhabitants were changed irrevocably.

Lois Conner and Ed Burtynsky, two North American photographers, have captured epochal transformations along the Yangtze’s Three Gorges. Black and white images from 1997 by New York-based Lois Conner are informed by a deep knowledge of the country cultivated since 1984. Canadian photographer Ed Burtynsky captures the drama of construction and deconstruction in large color photographs from 2002.