Our Changing World Amazing Images

Several hundred pairs of photographs reproduced facing each other across the pages of this glossy coffee table book, selected and arranged by journalist Fred Pearce to illustrate how landscapes and cityscapes from around the world have changed in the last 100 years. 

The concept is simple, no doubt, but is bound to evoke a complex range of responses from readers. On the one hand, flipping through some of the pages is a bit like browsing through an album of old family high resolution stock photos where the faces are recognizable, but the styles and settings are curiously uncomfortable and sometimes out of date. A photograph from 1925 of Ginza of Tokyo shows only a few multi-story buildings flanking a street crowded with cars. Across the top is Ginza today, the facades of glass and steel towers showing signs advertising lights and shop awnings.

One of the most important images convey so graphically is the incredible pace of development over the last century. In a nighttime photo of Los Angeles, taken in 1908 from nearby Mount Wilson (erroneously identified in the caption as Kitt Peak in Arizona), city lights are barely visible as a small glow in the distance. In 2007, the blaze has spread like mold in a petri dish, of perspective, from the feet all the way to the horizon. In another two pages, the space of just a quarter of a century between two aerial photos of the Brazilian rain forest shows an almost uninterrupted field vegetation also became a continuous grid of forest roads filled with debris from the demolished wood.

The other side of that excessive growth is a catastrophic destruction. Forces of nature have always been capable of immense violence, but as more people move into areas previously considered dangerous, the potential for large loss of life and property grows. Photographic pairs instructive document the devastation of October 2005 Pakistan earthquake, the 2004 Christmas tsunami in Sumatra, and August 2005 floods in New Orleans by Hurricane Katrina. One of the photographs that most would affect Madagascar from the air, rivers bleeding millions of tonnes of red mud in the Indian Ocean, an unprecedented level of erosion before the clearing of most of the wooded slopes of the island.