Lost China

E: The Environmental Magazine, March-April, 2005 by Cathy Shufro

Photographer Linda Butler's elegy to the Yangtze River documents a landscape and a way of life radically disrupted by the damming of China's Three Gorges. In 101 lustrous black-and-white photographs, Butler captures the transformation of a 360-mile section of the Yangtze from river to reservoir--a project that will force 1.3 million people to abandon their homes by 2009.

Images in Yangtze Remembered: The River Beneath the Lake (Stanford University Press, $65) include that of a 400 year-old Buddhist temple, soon to be dismantled; the abstract patterns of tiled roots seen from above; and a small boy whose fluffy white dog provides evidence of prosperity: Paired pictures show a steep misty, gorge, then the canyon reduced by higher water to a rounded hillside. Butler discusses both the dam's advantages (deep water for shipping, abundant electricity; flood control) and its potentially devastating consequences (the lake could become a cesspool, the weight of dammed water could cause earthquakes if tectonic plates shift). Butler's photographs constitute a portrait of loss: of human communities, of their architectural and archeological legacy, and of the land itself.