Nichole Sobecki – Where Our Land Was

The consequences of advancing climate change are already more than evident in Somalia. After researching a historic archive of images, Nichole Sobecki went on to document the severe changes that are denying a safe future for the people of the Horn of Africa.

Somalia has always suffered from extreme temperatures, recurring droughts, and plagues of locusts – all of which result in great famines. Decades of civil war and the increasing impact of climate change have turned the country into a permanent humanitarian crisis. Nichole Sobecki began to focus more intensely on the situation there, when she and her research partner,  Laura Heaton, discovered the only existing documentation on land surveys in Somalia, which had been hidden in Great Britain for 35 years. It was made up of an unusual archive of images, produced in the seventies and eighties by scientists who had travelled all over the country in land rovers and bush planes; they studied the environment in over one thousand locations, and documented it all with photographs. “In researching this story, we also learned that, in less than a generation, parts of Somalia had gone from being semi-arid to arid. We decided to return to some of the locations from the survey and re-photograph them, as a way of understanding the degree to which Somalia’s land has been impacted by climate change and environmental degradation,” Sobecki reports. “What we found, unfortunately, was a real and dramatic change. Ultimately, though, it became the human element – the people we met in the process of re-photographing these locations, and their stories — that are at the heart of the project.”

Sobecki documents everyday situations, without focussing exclusively on the fight for survival, during drought conditions. Her sensitive images further include moments of touching and humorous encounters, though these pictures convey more sentimentality than optimism. This is clearly expressed in the title of the series: “Where Our Land Was”. Climate change will only continue to drive more and more people out of Somalia and the surrounding areas.