For three years, photographer Elena Marsh followed the Murray-Darling Basin from its alpine headwaters to the dry lakebeds of South Australia, documenting the communities whose lives are shaped by the river system’s slow decline.
“I wanted to make work that sat between documentary and elegy,” Marsh says of the series, which was shortlisted for exhibition at Head On Photo Festival 2026. “Every frame is a negotiation between what the land used to give and what it can still give now.”
The resulting body of work — forty black-and-white and colour photographs made over repeated trips between 2023 and 2026 — traces irrigation channels, dry orchards, and the towns built around a river that no longer runs the way it once did.
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