A thirsting planet through the lens

Though James Whitlow Delano has devoted years of his life to photographing the global water crisis, he was not paying much attention to the recent conference on climate change.

It’s not that he didn’t care about what the world’s leaders did in Copenhagen. But he couldn’t follow the negotiations over the earth’s future because he was cut off — virtually incommunicado — working in the Gobi Desert in Inner Mongolia. Lens reached him at an Internet cafe in a small settlement as a sandstorm approached.

“The problem is that you have growing population, greater consumption of water per person and expanding deserts due to global warming,” said Mr. Delano. “There is unprecedented development in desert areas and little or no acknowledgement that water will run out.”

Mr. Delano cites rapidly receding glaciers, the diversion of rivers, the overuse of aquifers that cannot be replenished and the rapid development of semi-arid and desert areas.

It is a complex and subtle issue that Mr. Delano illustrates with dreamlike black-and-white images that drive home the point that water is running out in many places across the world. He puts his photographs of spreading deserts in Morocco, Yemen, China and Mali side by side with photographs of the American West to show that this is not a distant problem and that America is subject to the same laws of nature.

Mr. Delano, 49, remembers growing up “blissfully” unaware in California as water alerts would come and go. It was not until he moved to Japan 16 years ago and started photographing in China that he became concerned about the use of water in the United States.

“The problem became particularly apparent when I began to see remarkable echoes of American history in the development of China with massive dam building, mining, fouled air and the ploughing of the steppe/prairie resulting in a new Chinese dust bowl,” Mr. Delano wrote in an e-mail message.

Carrying a Leica with a 35-millimeter lens, Mr. Delano photographs fast and unobtrusively. He says that photography is part of his D.N.A. “I am moved by light,” he said. “I like to tell stories. There is this need to travel and learn that I have been lucky enough to indulge.”