Once, There Was a Sea...

Gorgan Bay is the largest bay of the Caspian Sea, formed by the eastward expansion of the Miankaleh Peninsula along the southeastern Caspian coast. In recent years, the bay has faced increasing pressure from rising temperatures, evaporation, reduced rainfall, excessive exploitation of marine resources, and changes to the waterways that feed it. Large areas of the bay have already dried out, leaving behind an increasingly fragile landscape. For years, the bay has been affected by a combination of challenges: insufficient water for the regeneration of aquatic life, overfishing, inadequate dredging of water channels, and the expansion of water reservoirs and fish farms upstream. Together, these pressures have intensified the environmental crisis. The continued decline in the bay's water level threatens not only aquatic life and migratory birds, but also the livelihoods of communities living around its shores. In the worst-case scenario, the disappearance of the bay could transform its exposed bed into a source of dust and force surrounding communities to consider migration. The consequences are already visible in the landscape. Fishing boats have been stranded far from the water. Recreational piers have become unusable. Roads once built to transport boats toward the sea now cross what was formerly the bed of the bay. Breakwaters stand beside a retreating shoreline, while abandoned structures remain as traces of a waterfront that is disappearing. During my last visit to the shores of Gorgan Bay in the summer of 2023, my daughter, looking at the receding water, said to her five-year-old brother: “There used to be a sea here...” That sentence became the title of this work. Photographed from the shores of Nokandeh to areas near the Iran–Turkmenistan border, this documentary series records the drying of Gorgan Bay as it has become increasingly visible and distressing. The photographs are intended as a visual record—not only of an environmental crisis, but of the traces left behind as water disappears: boats without a sea, piers without boats, and a shoreline gradually becoming something else. This is what remains when the sea retreats.