Alfredo Jaar’s The End confronts the increasingly visible disappearance of the Great Salt Lake resulting from excessive water extraction. His photographs document the lake’s loss of 73% of water and 60% of surface area since the mid-nineteenth century, according to current data.
Jaar’s images offer a stark contrast between the lake’s natural beauty and its accelerating devastation, described as an “environmental nuclear bomb” by Joel Ferry, a former Utah state lawmaker and the current Commissioner of the Utah Department of Natural Resources. The lake’s decline brings dangerously high water salinity levels and exposes toxic dust containing arsenic, lead, and mercury, endangering local ecosystems and posing a serious public health risk to residents.
According to Jaar, he decided “to print these images in a small, unspectacular format, as a kind of visual whisper, a lament for our dying planet”.
