What we know about disasters, we know from the media. The medium forms the message, so media forms the disaster, what we think it is and - maybe - what it is like to be in it. While for millenia natural disasters remained engimatic for the very practical reason that...
These images are from news reports from the metropolis in the Guangdong province, Southern China. The region experienced massive floodings in April 2024 once more due to intense rain. It's not a coastal city, instead Qingyuan has been repeatedly flooded by water from...
The city of Alexandria once had an extensive network of water cisterns below ground that distributed drinking water from a channel connecting the river Nile south-east of the city with the city’s harbor in the west. This was vital for the survival of the population as...
In Germany, the imagery of flood or flooding and of Noah's Ark is frequently used in the political discourse to refer to undesired migration. Since the 1990s this dehumanizing topos was in high demand and was used by mainstream media and radical political parties...
A street in the city of Bonn with the Rhine river in the background, January 2024.
Just 31 years lie between two disasters of the same nature along the shores of a lake in Western Norway destroying twice the two lakeside villages. Lake Lovatnet is considered one of the most beautiful lakes in Norway. In the first decade of the 1900s and again in the...
Quote by Lam Chiu-ying, former director of the Hong Kong Observatory, the central weather forecast agency of the government of Hong Kong, from an article in the Hong Kong Free Press about the Black Rainstorm and massive deluge of the week of September 4. 2023. Here is...
I first became aware of the presence of climate refugees from Bangladesh in Venice, Italy, through a remark, Amitav Ghosh made in his book "The Great Derangement: Climate Change and the Unthinkable" from 2016. There the Indian-US-American novelist notes that Bengali...
Already in 1986 the well known German news-magazine Der Spiegel published this image on it's front page. It depicts the Dome of Cologne, one of the most important cultural heritage sites of Germany, partially flooded. The visual strategies of the media have not...
This is from the New York times in 1959. thanks to Janet Grau for the lead!