Chloe Dewe Mathews: Caspian: The Elements

Caspian: The Elements is Chloe Dewe Mathews's record of five years spent roaming the borderlands of the Caspian Sea. In a resource-rich region roiled by contested geopolitics, Dewe Mathews found that elemental materials like oil, rock, and uranium are central to the mystical, practical, artistic, religious, and therapeutic aspects of daily life. With essays by Morad Montazami, Sean O'Hagan, and Arnold van Bruggen, Caspian: The Elements offers a series of powerful visual narratives that explore the deep links between the peoples of the Caspian and their enigmatic and coveted landscapes.

Copublished by Aperture and Peabody Museum Press
Caspian: The Elements is Chloe Dewe Mathews's record of her journey through the beguiling Caspian region, considering its people and geography. Far from the arena of global politics, Dewe Mathews found that materials like oil, salt, and water are involved in the mystical, practical, artistic, religious, and therapeutic aspects of daily life. Caspian: The Elements is composed of a series of visual stories exploring the link between humans and this enigmatic and much-coveted landscape.
Chloe Dewe Mathews (born in London, 1982) is an artist, photographer, and filmmaker based in St. Leonards-on-Sea, England. She is the recipient of the Robert Gardner Fellowship in Photography from Harvard University's Peabody Museum of Archaeology & Ethnology. Her work has been published in the Guardian and Financial Times and has been exhibited at the Tate Modern and British Library, London; Irish Museum of Modern Art, Dublin; and Staatliche Kunstsammlungen, Dresden.
Morad Montazami is Adjunct Research Curator for the Middle East and North Africa at Tate Modern, London, and director of Zam�n Books, Paris.
Sean O'Hagan writes about photography for the Guardian and the Observer.
Arnold van Bruggen, a writer and filmmaker based in Amsterdam, is cofounder of Prospektor, a documentary production company. He is the coauthor with Rob Hornstra of The Sochi Project: An Atlas of War and Tourism in the Caucasus (Aperture, 2013).
"In Caspian British documentary photographer Chloe Dewe Matthews delves deep into the landscapes and people of the Caspian Sea. Using the region's rich natural resources - oil, rock, uranium - she explores the religious traditions and communal practices, including bathing in crude oil, that endure in an area more often defined by its contested geopolitics."--Sean O'Hagan, The Guardian, Best Books of 2018, Photography category