Note to Correspondents

‘HARD RAIN’ EXHIBIT OPENS AT UNITED NATIONS HEADQUARTERS ON 5 MAY

 

A photographic exhibition entitled “Hard Rain: Our Headlong Collision with Nature” will be launched in the North-East Gallery of the Visitors’ Lobby on Monday, 5 May, at 6:30 p.m. to coincide with the sixteenth Review Session of the Commission on Sustainable Development, taking place from 5 to 16 May at United Nations Headquarters.

Hard Rain is a photo essay by Mark Edwards, a photographer and founder of the photo agency Still Pictures, on the subject of climate change, poverty and the sixth great extinction.  In July 1969, lost on the edge of the Sahara desert, Edwards was rescued by a Tuareg nomad who took the photographer to his people, rubbed two sticks together to make a fire and produced a cassette player of Bob Dylan singing A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall.  As Dylan piled image upon image, the idea came to Edwards of illustrating each line of the song.  In the years that followed, he travelled to over 150 countries to photograph our headlong collision with nature.  Hard Rain is the result -- a collection of photographs illustrating Dylan’s prophetic lyrics.

Dylan wrote Hard Rain during the Cuban missile crisis in 1962.  But, as he has stated, this extraordinary song is open to much wider interpretation.  “It doesn’t really matter where a song comes from.  It just matters where it takes you.”

Images from Edwards’ personal archive, plus contributions by Sebastião Salgado, Chris Steele-Perkins and others, combine with the words of rock music’s great poetic writer to form the centrepiece of Hard Rain.  Also on display is a section of commentaries by Edwards and other notables such as David Bohm, J. Krishnamurti, James Lovelock and Jeffrey Sachs.

The exhibition is sponsored by Still Pictures, the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) and the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP), in association with Columbia Records and with the support of the Network for Social Change.  The opening reception is made possible by generous contributions from Diageo, Kiva Café and Peter Arnold Inc.

For further information, to request an interview with Mark Edwards or for a review copy of the Hard Rain book, please e-mail: lucinda@hardrainproject.com.

For more information on United Nations exhibitions, please contact Jan Arnesen at tel.:  +1 212 963 8531, e-mail: arnesen@un.org; or Liza Wichmann at tel.:  +1 212 963 0089, e-mail: wichmann@un.org.

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For information media • not an official record