Storytelling for Change ft. Sophia Nasif

So this is from my website, you can obviously go on it and have a read up, but I just wanted to show you what I was working with.

So the Shape of the Sea was a project that I applied for the Photographers Without Borders grant with and it's actually the first time I've had a big grant project like this, so this is kind of my entire career as an advocacy and environmental photojournalist has only kicked off last January so all of this work I'm about to tell you about has been done in the last year which is probably why I look so exhausted all the time.

So when I applied for this grant I had moved back to the Maldives and I knew that I wanted to make work about what's happening to the country because I went back and you know when you go home after a long time and you kind of had this rose-tinted view of like oh I can't wait to be there but there's a lot of problems unless you know when you live there you become more and more aware of it and one thing that was happening is a lot of reclamation work is happening and there's a lot of young people who are struggling because The environment is very heavily impacted and there's coastal erosion and unfortunately our current government, and I'll have to be careful how I word this, they are not the most environmentally friendly.

So I applied for this grant and I actually learned a lot just through getting the grant and everything.

I applied and was really surprised when Danny emailed me and said, Hey, you're a finalist.

I was just there thinking, in fact, I think I misunderstood her.

And I was like, I thought I had to go through another round of interviews or something.

Um, so I was really shocked and surprised.

And I think I also, you know, it's kind of weird, isn't it? Cause you think if I knew now what I knew back then, um, and that kind of happened very quickly with this project.

So, um, I decided to do some case studies.

on this and I first started off by doing a call out on my social media and asking for people who were impacted by coastal erosion or any kind of coastal damage, whether man-made or natural, to reach out to me.

And that really expanded my view of what was happening in the country, because I'd been there for three months at this point.

Even though it was my home country and I'd visited, I still was catching up on context and background and all those years I'd missed out by living in the UK.

And that's where this project kind of started.

And it actually became very, very collaborative because people reached out to me and said, we've got this happening.

Can you come and work with us? And it was a real journey because I also was relearning all of my culture and my country's history in that time.

And what really struck me is that all the people contacting me were young.

Nobody was over the age of 30.

Most of them were super, super young, like we're talking 17 year olds reaching out to me.

And one thing that really stuck out to me is, more than the actual story of the coastal erosion and everything was these young people who were so passionate about what was happening, but just didn't know how to speak about it or how to do something about it.

So we did several case studies.

I went to quite a few islands.

So I started off in Ukulas, where the dredging has actually altered the wave patterns.

around the island and I don't think anyone realised, including the people who contacted me, how bad the erosion was until we got there and got the drone up in the air.

So this is Okulas and as you can see this entire side of the island has eroded quite severely and What made me quite sad is here you can see a juvenile grey heron and the heron had just completely adapted and herons I don't know if you know this, but they tend to come back to the exact same spots for feeding every single day.