Photographer Vincent Jendly is the Edge of Humanity Magazine contributor of this documentary photography. From the project ‘Anthropocène’. To see Vincent’s body of work, click on any image.

Between 2015 and 2020, I roamed around several large seaports everywhere for my previous photographic series, “Lux in tenebris”. The port of Dunkirk – very different from the ones I had seen until then – was instantaneously love at first sight: dedicated mostly to coal and steel, it appeared much darker, much grimier than the others, a radical, brutal and sharp elsewhere. I was facing a transformation by humans to the extreme, a spectacular incarnation of the Anthropocene, covered in mud and black dust, one of those visions that suggest an imminent collapse, with almost apocalyptic allure… A fortunately hypothetical end. However, the giganticness of the installations and the extent of the marks on the landscape made me grasp the stamp of Man at an earthly scale.

During this fascinating work, the deluge of darkness and fire that I was experiencing clearly inspired the climatic fears that affect many of us. How could we be here further away from a bucolic and unspoiled nature?

Fortunately, Dunkirk is also molding into a new era, with industries starting a process of imperative changes, which tends to drastically reduce their impact on the environment. While waiting for these better days, my feet sinking in coal, I stared at a figure of the past, documenting the times of industrial revolution, a first period of the Anthropocene before the one that is already succeeding, more luminous and joyful.