India is a land where opulence and extreme poverty coexist.
At its heart lies the village of Jharia, where countless people have lived for over a century atop underground coal seams that continue to burn relentlessly.

This land should have become uninhabitable—an abandoned wasteland. Yet, more and more people remain, enduring the flames.

The government and mining companies have attempted to relocate the residents, but most refuse.
Relocation means losing their only means of survival. Without protection from the state, leaving is akin to a death sentence.
Every day, people inhale toxic gases while collecting or stealing coal, passing down the skills of survival from generation to generation.
They are, quite literally, people living amidst death.

They destroy the environment in order to survive.
It is a tragedy—but are we really any different?
Though the scale may vary, we all participate in environmental destruction for the sake of survival.
The burning coal, the countless baskets of charcoal, the suffocating children and families—these images mirror the structural contradictions of our own lives and the absurdities of capitalism.

In this project, I employed the visual language of commercial photography.
Artificial lighting and digital post-production were used to portray a harsh, destructive reality as cold, refined imagery.
This visual detachment reflects not only the distance between image and reality, but also the gap between “them” and “us,” between logos and pathos.

They destroy their environment to survive.
But what about us?

These photographs are the beginning of that question.

Autumn, 2014. by Hakbong Kwon