Hard Rain

Setting Bob Dylan’s words to pictures is a powerful combination. Even more so when the book’s printed in the right way.

When Rolling Stone magazine devoted an issue to climate change six months ago it chose to do it on paper that contained not a thread of recycled fibre. Why? Because the US magazine was publishing the world’s greatest photographers and print quality on recycled paper wouldn’t do them justice, deputy managing editor Eric Bates told the New York Times.

It’s an attitude that exasperates Mark Edwards, a London-based photographer with a global-scale reputation. Recycled paper can do the job, he says. “What they were saying was that they wanted to make people think about climate change, but they themselves didn’t want to walk the talk.”

Edwards knows what he’s talking about. The latest edition of his campaigning book Hard Rain: Our Headlong Collision with Nature was published in October and is a remarkable combination of environmental polemic and powerful images. It’s a book that looks 100% but has been printed on paper containing 50% recycled fibre.

The story started out with the young Edwards lost alone on the edge of the Sahara in the summer of 1969. By a stroke of good fortune he was rescued by a Tuareg nomad. He describes a surreal scene in which they sat eating while listening to Bob Dylan singing ‘A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall’ on the nomad’s cassette player.

Hearing the song’s vision of a world destroyed by nuclear war had a profound effect on Edwards in that unusual place, setting him off on a personal mission that has taken close to 40 years – and 150 countries – to complete. His aim? To find one image to illustrate each line of Dylan’s dark composition.

The pictures are, for the most part, gut-wrenching. Each one different, the sum of their parts is a warning of the damage man is doing to the planet. So, alongside Dylan’s line “heard the roar of a wave that could drown the whole world” there’s a picture of a corpse on sand and a woman prostrate in grief. A young mother living in a huge pipe in Calcutta is used to cast a light on the line “hear the song of the poet who died in the gutter”.

“It is, I know, pretty uncompromising,” he says. “But that’s because it was a personal project and I never thought for one moment that I’d get permission from Dylan’s office to do a book, so there was never any thought that I should water it down.”

Rejected by every publisher approached, Edwards finally decided to do it himself. It has turned out, he says, to be the best decision he’s ever made. Given total freedom from beginning to end he has been able to go his own way. That included choosing how his books would be printed.

To anyone outside the world of print Hard Rain looks just the sort of glossy coffee table book you’d expect to come with a hefty environmental cost. But Edwards chose to work with Sussex-based Beacon Press, winner of Print Week’s fine art printer of the year award – and the company that helps make Green Futures happen. Part of the Pureprint Group, Beacon uses vegetable inks, recycles more than 90% of the dry waste and cleaning solvents produced along the way, is powered by green energy and is carbon neutral. So not only are the hard-hitting pages of the book made of green paper (Revive 50:50 silk), the printing press is leaving a very light environmental footprint, too.

Copies of the book are being sent to leading politicians and business and religious leaders to influence their thinking on the state of the planet. Any responses to the wake up call will be exhibited alongside Edwards’ photographs at the UN headquarters in New York in May. Perhaps the people from Rolling Stone will stop by… – Julian Rollins

To read more about the book, visit www.hardrainproject.com

Beacon Press is a Forum for the Future partner.

5 January 2008

Julian Rollins