Zed Nelson, a star speaker at our forthcoming Festival of Photography: Documentary, is one of the UK’s most distinguished photojournalists. He will be talking in depth about his latest award-winning book project, The Anthropecene Illusion, reviewed here by Peter Dench
A name familiar to many AP readers, Zed Nelson has long been one of photography’s sharpest-eyed social critics. With The Anthropocene Illusion, he delivers his most visually seductive sucker punch to date.
Traversing 14 countries across four continents over six years, Nelson turns his lens on the fabricated wilderness we increasingly accept as nature—plastic palm trees, piped birdsong, and climate-controlled ‘safaris’ complete with Prosecco and Wi-Fi.
Nature as sanitised theatre
Nelson exposes the strange, sanitised theatre of our times: snow cannons blasting over melting ski slopes, polar bears pacing beneath shopping mall skylights, and faux rainforests hermetically sealed inside glass domes. It’s Blue Planet by way of Black Mirror.
These are places where nothing happens unless it’s on the schedule—no thorns, no predators, no inconvenient weather. Nature as spectacle, carefully curated and risk-free, as if David Attenborough had teamed up with Wes Anderson and lost the plot.
This is not just a photo book – it’s a provocation. Nelson doesn’t shout. He doesn’t need to. His photographs are eloquent, ironic, and devastatingly composed, letting the absurdities and contradictions of our Anthropocene playground speak for themselves. There’s wit, too – like a long traffic jam of SUVs “enjoying” the great outdoors, or holidaymakers sunning themselves on synthetic beaches while the real coastlines erode offstage.
A thought-provoking work
The Anthropocene Illusion is as beautiful as it is bleak, a coffee-table book that might just slap your conscience awake between sips. The images are impeccably printed across 196 pages, with an afterword by Nelson that threads urgency through his usual calm intelligence. It’s no surprise the project won him the title Photographer of the Year 2025 at the Sony World Photography Award 2025.
Nelson is not just documenting a crisis – he’s photographing a kind of global denial, a collective self-delusion with stunning stage lighting. It’s a masterpiece of quiet fury from one of the best working today.
At our forthcoming Festival of Photography: Documentary, Zed will also be taking us behind the scenes of his other projects, including Gun Nation, an unflinching examination of US gun culture. Full ticket details for the Festival of Photography: Documentary can be found here . You can also win tickets here!
