‘We're creating an illusion for ourselves': Photographer explores how humans have lost touch with nature

CNN

4 days ago

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Zed Nelson spots the painting on the wall behind me almost as soon as we begin our interview.
'It's perfect,' he said.
The canvas depicts a sleeping tiger draped across a velvet cushion, floating among pastel-shade leaves and flowers. The London-based photographer doesn't mean 'perfect' as in 'masterfully painted;' he means it's the perfect metaphor for the idealized, human-centric relationship we've cultivated with nature.
The painting reminds him of another artwork, 'A young Tiger Playing With Its Mother,' by the French Romantic artist Eugene Delacroix, who used a captive tiger at a zoo and his pet cat as models.
'The Romantic movement in painting began with the human divorce from the natural world. As we removed ourselves from nature, and it receded from our imagination, we reenacted these hyper-romantic versions of nature,' said Nelson.
It's the central thesis of his latest project, 'The Anthropocene Illusion,' which earned him Photographer of the Year at the 2025 Sony World Photography Awards. Captured across 14 countries and four continents over six years, the images show nature as imagined by humans: staged habitats in zoos, manufactured ski slopes, indoor rainforests, and artificial beaches.
In his previous project, 'Love Me,' Nelson explored the homogenization of beauty standards. 'There's some echo of that here. It's about how this artificial, idealized version of nature is being — I mean, I want to say sold back to us, but we're willing participants in it, too,' Nelson explained.
'While we destroy the real thing, we seem to be creating more and more artificial or choreographed, curated versions of nature.'
It's this 'psychological disconnect' that Nelson is most interested in exposing. The collection is equal parts ironic (a Maasai tribesman posing beside a picnic blanket for an 'Out of Africa' champagne brunch in Kenya) and dystopian (a child perched on a fiberglass rock at a beach in the world's largest indoor rainforest, the canvas of the sky slightly ripped behind him).
'That's very sort of Truman Show-esque. He's gone to the very edge of that artificial world,' said Nelson of the photo.
More than anything, though, there's a feeling of sadness that permeates the collection: taxidermied museum dioramas of endangered species; vibrant fish shoals swimming in dark aquariums with plastic pipes, captive elephants paraded to a bathing spot for the benefit of flocks of Instagram influencers; a caged polar bear crouched beside a mural depicting an Arctic landscape it will never know.
'What we replaced real nature with becomes an unwitting monument, really, for what we've lost,' Nelson observed.
The term 'Anthropocene' refers to the age of humans. It's not an official epoch — yet. But Nelson believes firmly that, in years to come, today's society will mark the beginning of this new era, evident in elevated carbon dioxide levels from fossil fuels, an abundance of microplastics, and layers of concrete.
'The usefulness of renaming an epoch, in this instance, would be to focus people's attention on our impact on the planet,' said Nelson. As he sees it, 'the language of (environmental action) has become sort of tired or stale; you become kind of immune to it.'
He wanted to counter this collective numbness with visuals that 'make you think or feel differently.'
Bleak but beautiful, his photos reveal a paradox.
Less than 3% of the world's land remains ecologically intact, according to a 2021 study, yet nature-based tourism and biophilic architecture, a design philosophy that mimics nature, are surging in popularity. Global wildlife populations have dropped by an average of 73% in the last 50 years; meanwhile, there are more tigers in captivity than in the wild, globally.
Arctic ice sheets are on course for catastrophic 'runaway melting' that would see rising sea levels devastate coastal communities. But at the same time, cocktail bars in Dubai are importing ancient glacier ice from Greenland to provide the wealthy with pollution-free drinks.
'We're engaged in creating an illusion for ourselves; either to hide what we're doing, or as something that we can retreat into for reassurance, because we crave the very thing that we've lost,' said Nelson.
There's a spectrum to the illusion, ranging from managed outdoor landscapes to contrived scenes that simply evoke the idea of nature.
Nelson likens it to fast food: 'We don't want to grow it and prepare it; we just want it delivered to us with no thorns, no danger, with a nice walkway in a car park. We want to consume it and then come home. We are complicit in it.'
Despite his criticisms of the 'consumerist' qualities of today's manufactured natural experiences, Nelson emphasizes that he's not necessarily against any of these things: people should enjoy safaris, be awe-inspired at aquariums, relish their time in a local park, and not 'destroy ourselves with guilt.'
'We have this enduring craving for nature, for a connection to the natural world. That's real,' he observed.
There's a limit to what the individual can do, too: the kind of sweeping change required to protect the environment needs to come from major corporations and political leaders, which, in Nelson's view, is sorely lacking.
'It's important to remind ourselves, it's not that we don't have ideas for things that can be done,' he said, reeling off a long list of environmental policies that could change the course of climate change.
Perhaps this book, with its stark juxtaposition of astonishing wildlife and human interference, can be a reminder of just how in control of the world we are — with the power to remodel it in our own image, or protect and restore the landscapes we feel so connected to.
'When you're surrounded by something so much, it can become utterly invisible,' Nelson said. 'Photography is a way of trying to make it visible again, trying to expose it for what it actually is.'
After the call ends, I can't unsee the Anthropocene illusion in my home. It's not just the anthropomorphic tiger on the wall. It's a Himalayan rock salt lamp, a plastic monstera plant and paper carnations. A cockatoo-shaped ceramic jug next to pine-scented candles and an aluminum 'lemon-wedge' bottle opener. Floral-print cushions and a jungle-themed throw.
It's hard to shake Nelson's words about our collective complicity; our willingness to participate in reconstructing the natural world, instead of saving it.