The first time I came to the reservoir, in the spring of 2003, the water was already rising. I was nineteen and travelling with a borrowed Pentax, and I did not yet understand that a landscape can be half-true. The old streets of Zigui ended in a clean horizontal line, as though an editor had run a blade across the photograph. What remained above the water looked ordinary. What lay below it, I was told, was everything.
I came back in 2019, and then again in 2021, 2022 and 2024. Not to mourn — the mourning had been done, thoroughly and well, by photographers more gifted than me — but to look at what the water had made of the living. The towns rebuilt on higher ground are not poor imitations of the ones they replaced. They are something else: louder, faster, fuller of light, and a little uncertain of themselves, the way a person is uncertain in a house they have not yet finished furnishing.
The pictures here were made in the hour before the ferries start, when the new promenades are empty and the old men come down to the water to do the things old men have always done beside rivers — to stretch, to spit, to read the weather with their bodies. I printed them small at first, on matte paper, and they looked like nothing. Then I printed them large, and they looked like apologies. In the end I settled on a size between the two: big enough to feel the damp, small enough to remember that the river does not care about the photograph.