Resilience can mean many things to different people, spanning art, culture, history, language, science and nature, to name but a few. What is fascinating about resilience is that it may not be limited to words. Photography can be used to explore a highly ambiguous term by revealing its meaning through pictures. Not long ago IHRR held an online photo competition to see how people viewed resilience from their perspective. What we received in response was a wide range of photos, from portraits of people to landscapes, ways of life and survival. These photos tell stories of resilience in both personal and universal ways. Since we couldn’t include all of the photos in the next issue of our magazine Hazard Risk Resilience, we decided to post some of the runners-up here for everyone to see.
“The town of Mahachai (or Samutsakorn) was originally founded during the Ayutthaya period, about 500 years ago. It developed to become a fishing town which still persists today. It made me think of how resilient traditional fishing is despite increasing environmental problems, such as dirty waters, which sometimes halt fishing for long periods of time, and the simple fact that there are less fish in the sea”.
“In this series entitled ‘Living anatomy’ I explore the anatomical models and simulations used in medical education and the parameters of health, life and normality. I situate my own body next to, or behind the educational model bodies alternating between being trapped in the matrix of artificial bodies, or manipulating them. Different layers of the body are distinguished and brought back together again, playing with the transparency of the body. The images are created as a part of my postdoctoral research project during a field trip in the Peninsula College of Medicine and Dentistry in Plymouth UK in 2012″.
“The Teeside Steelworks from the beach at Seaton Carew in North East England. More than 1,600 jobs were lost at the site in 2010, but production resumed in 2012 after the site was purchased by another company”.