The Washington Post published the photographs of Mustafah Abdulaziz, a Berlin-based American photographer who had dedicated the last five years to photographing the global water crisis. These photos are beautiful and powerful. They tell the story of the water crisis not just in one area, but in many areas all around the world and of how people living in those different areas are experiencing it. I found two of the photographs particularly poignant — the photo of the children journeying to water and the photograph of the Nigerian water pump, surrounded by visitors. I think these two photos stood out to me because they did more than simply show me a dam that had gone dry or a boat. These photos put faces, emotions, and struggle to the event. They made me feel something, as did the photo of the empty Ganges riverbed. We can hear about a water crisis, we can hear how bad it is… but, sometimes, it helps to see it for us to really understand. These images did that for me. That said, I think the gallery would benefit from better captioning. The images are powerful alone, but I’d like to know more about each photo. Where are the children journeying to in order to get water? How long have they been traveling? What did Mariam Terkuma experience that made her a good choice for a photograph in this collection? What are the people doing in the photo captioned ‘Bewatoo, Tharparkar, Pakistan’? Better captioning would give this gallery more impact.
