£45, Guest Editions, May 2025, 196 pages, 75 colour images, 254 x 300mm, Casebound in cloth with foiled embossed title: ISBN: 9781736234559
Zed Nelson has long been one of photography’s sharpest-eyed social critics, and with The Anthropocene Illusion, he delivers his most visually seductive sucker punch to date. Traversing fourteen countries across four continents over six years, Nelson turns his lens on the fabricated wilderness we increasingly accept as nature – plastic palm trees, piped birdsong, and climate-controlled ‘safaris’ complete with Prosecco and Wi-Fi.
Nelson exposes the strange, sanitised theatre of our times: snow cannons blasting over melting ski slopes, polar bears pacing beneath shopping mall skylights, and faux rainforests hermetically sealed inside glass domes. It’s Blue Planet by way of Black Mirror. These are places where nothing happens unless…