A GROUP OF CHILDREN AND ADULTS, perched on a sunlit boat in the water, stare back at the camera in an image in Solmaz Daryani’s project “The Eyes of Earth.” The photograph was taken 36 years ago at Sharafkhaneh port, East-Azerbaijan province—a region that used to be a bustling spot for visitors to Lake Urmia, a salt lake in northwest Iran. Daryani’s maternal family lived and worked in the area, and the photograph features her grandfather, who owned a motel, and her uncle, who was a sailor. Another image, taken by Daryani in 2015, shows young boys in the same region, but the landscape is unrecognisably different. Much of the lake pictured in the first image has dried up, leaving behind a dusty and barren shore. One boy balances precariously on a rusty boat, the very presence of which seems incongruous because of the missing water. The warmth of the first photograph, which looks like a cheerful family outing, is entirely absent from this stark image of isolation.
When Daryani contemplates what has happened to Lake Urmia, she arrives at the present after a detour through the past. She intersperses a few photographs from the 1970s, unearthed from old family albums, with recent photographs of the region. The contrast is a graphic reminder that the lake and its surroundings were once idyllic and beautiful, had flourishing ecological life, and that its slow dessication has affected several generations.
Urmia—formerly the second-largest salt lake in West Asia—shrank by nearly 80 percent over thirty years. Although recent rainfall has helped the lake revive a little, the drying up was the result of drought triggered by climate change. Illegal wells and construction have also taken their toll, according to Daryani: the Shahid Kalantari highway, for instance, involved drying up 85 percent of the boundary between the western and eastern sides of the lake. This has threatened the habitat of species that were found in the area, such as the brine shrimp and the egret. “The lake’s ducks, flamingos and pelicans have vanished, too,” Daryani added.
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