Once the world’s fourth-largest inland body of water, the Aral Sea shrank to just 10 percent of its original size after Soviet engineers redirected the two rivers that fed it, Amu Darya in the south and the Syr Darya in the north east, in the 1960s. Keen to promote cotton growing, the Soviets dismissed the sea as “Nature’s error”, but Karakalpakstan has come to miss the Aral Ten’iz (“a sea which fled its shores”).

The seabed has turned into a desert, the fishing industry has collapsed, farmers’ crops have withered, and the population is suffering from spiralling respiratory diseases, caused by sand and salt whipped up by wind. Karakalpakstan is also under continuous political siege by Uzbekistan, and these factors have ensured that much of the population has also fled its shores. Official figures put emigration to Turkmenistan and Kazakhstan at more than 50,000 over the past decade, roughly 10 percent of the population, but the real number is thought to be much higher.

Larkin’s project was self-initiated and he and journalist Jack Shenker had to pretend to be tourists to shoot it, which meant they could spend only two weeks in Karakalpakstan. Many of the people they encountered were extremely wary of foreign visitors. “This, out of all my stories so far, was the most trying of projects as there was little access, and so many restrictions and limitations,” says Larkin.

“The treatment over the last 20 years of people who opposed the Uzbek government, and its treatment of the Karakalpakstan, is very severe so people were nervous, paranoid and hesitant to be interviewed and photographed.”
He got around the problem through research, reading up about the area before travelling and sitting in on all Shenker’s interviews. “It’s very easy become misinformed and mislead your audience if you only go on surface appearance,” he says. Mistake of Nature went on to be published in the National Review supplement in UAE, then Internazionale in Italy and the UK’s Prospect.

Larkin trained as a photojournalist in London, and has forged a successful career as a documentary photographer. His work reflects on peripheral current affairs on issues such as identity and social environments, and he was awarded the 2011 Arnold Newman Award for New Directions in Photographic Portraiture for his Past Perfect project in Egypt. Larkin lived in Egypt for nearly three years, and says he enjoys long-term projects which allow him to get under the skin of a topic. “On top of that, I then bring in my emotional response,” he says. “It’s this that defines my photographic style.”

Visit www.jasonlarkin.co.uk.