Image of Schoolgirls Beside the Vanished Aral Sea Honored on UN Human Rights Day

(New York, NY — December 10, 2023) — Photography 4 Humanity, the photography pillar of the High Note Global Initiative, proudly announces Kristina Varaksina as the winner of the 2023 High Note Global Prize in Photography. Her arresting photograph, The Seashore is No Longer Here — taken in Karakalpakstan, in northwestern Uzbekistan — captures schoolgirls standing in an abandoned seaport beside an installation marking where the Aral Sea once reached, a visual testament to one of the most devastating man-made environmental disasters in modern history.

The announcement, made today on United Nations Human Rights Day, underscores that climate and environmental collapse are inseparable from human rights, and that some of the world’s most vulnerable communities have already lost what most of the world is still trying to protect. Once the world’s fourth-largest lake, the Aral Sea has lost roughly ninety percent of its volume since the 1960s, when Soviet irrigation diverted the rivers that fed it to support cotton production.

What remains is a desert of salt, sand, and the rusted hulls of fishing boats — and a Karakalpak population whose health, livelihoods, and culture have been catastrophically reshaped: the World Health Organization has documented anemia rates of 80 to 90 percent among women and children in the region.

“Kristina Varaksina’s photograph is the visual archive of a sea that should still exist. Two schoolgirls stand exactly where their grandparents once fished, beside a marker that exists only because the water does not. It is a quiet, devastating reminder that environmental loss is generational loss — and that the children who inherit a vanished landscape have inherited a vanished future, unless the world chooses otherwise.”

— David Clark, founder, High Note Global

In official partnership with United Nations Human Rights, Photography 4 Humanity invites amateur and professional photographers from around the world to bear witness to the human dimension of our most urgent challenges. As one of the two founding pillars of the High Note Global Initiative — alongside High Note Music — the program stands for the conviction that a single image can move the conscience of the world.

This year, Photography 4 Humanity received thousands of submissions from across the globe, showcasing the work of photographers committed to illuminating the stories of those most impacted by the climate and environmental emergencies of our time. Varaksina’s winning image and other top entries were featured at the United Nations headquarters in New York on UN Human Rights Day, and viewed globally on UN.org.

For more information, visit www.photography4humanity.com.