How one photographer’s 1960s images of East Africa reveal the breathtaking speed of environmental transformation
In 1967, Mirella Ricciardi crouched beside Lake Turkana’s alkaline shores, her camera capturing Kenyan fishermen hauling nets beneath an endless sky. The world’s largest permanent desert lake stretched before her lens: vast, ancient, seemingly eternal.
Today, those same shores tell a different story.
The lake has shrunk dramatically. The fish populations have dwindled. The communities that once thrived along its banks now struggle with an ecosystem transformed beyond recognition. What Ricciardi documented as a “land of untamed wilderness” has become something else entirely: a living laboratory of climate change.
Right: Members of the Pokot community in northern Kenya. IMAGE: © Mirella Ricciardi MR2173
The vanishing point
The Science Museum’s new online exhibition, Vanishing Africa, transforms Ricciardi’s photographs into something more urgent than art- they become evidence. Curated by Science Director Dr Roger Highfield and former Deputy Director Dr Julia Knights, the collection reveals how dramatically East Africa has changed in just six decades.
Consider Mount Kilimanjaro. In Ricciardi’s 1960s photographs, Maasai warriors pose with Africa’s tallest mountain rising behind them, its glacial crown glinting in the distance. Those same glaciers now face complete disappearance by 2040, according to climate scientists. The Maasai, Samburu, Turkana, Orma, Pokot and Rendille communities who depend on Kilimanjaro’s water systems watch their lifeline slowly vanish.
“These images show people’s resilience in the face of adversity, and the deep bonds between them, land and tradition- connections we may sever forever if we do not act,” warns Professor Washington Yotto Ochieng of Imperial College London, himself a Trustee of the Science Museum Group.
The climate paradox
Yet the exhibition reveals something counterintuitive. While satellite data shows East Africa drying out, climate models predict more rainfall. Scientists call this the “East Africa Climate Paradox”, a puzzle that highlights how little we still understand about our changing planet.
The communities Ricciardi photographed are not waiting for scientists to solve that puzzle. They are adapting. Diversifying livelihoods. Reviving ancestral ecological practices their grandparents thought they would never need again.
“My mother captured a world on the brink, along with its spirit,” explains Amina Ricciardi-Dempsey, who now directs the Vanishing Africa Mirella Ricciardi Archives. “These photographs are our inheritance, and our responsibility. They compel us to see, to remember, and to act.”
Beyond documentation
What makes this exhibition remarkable is not just what it shows, but when it appears. Published to celebrate the UK/Africa Season of Culture and timed ahead of the international climate summit COP30, Vanishing Africa arrives at a moment when the world desperately needs to see climate change not as abstract data, but as human reality.
Ricciardi, born in Kenya in 1931 to Italian and French parents, began her career as an intern at Vogue in 1950s Paris. But her 1971 book Vanishing Africa established her unique mission: “to photograph the tribal life and customs of the people of East Africa before they changed forever.”
She succeeded beyond her own expectations. The photographs now serve as a baseline: scientific evidence of what East Africa looked like before climate change accelerated.
The reckoning
“Mirella Ricciardi’s images challenge us to think about the impacts of climate change on indigenous livelihoods, culture and ecosystems,” reflects Dr Highfield. The exhibition pairs each photograph with voices of climate scientists, Indigenous people, and conservationists, creating a dialogue between past and present.
The result is sobering. These are not just beautiful photographs of a bygone era. They are receipts. Proof of what we have already lost, and stark warnings about what we stand to lose next.
The communities in Ricciardi’s photographs understood something we are only now beginning to grasp: that human culture and natural ecosystems are inseparable. As the climate changes, both disappear together.
Vanishing Africa forces a question no previous generation has faced: What happens when the speed of environmental change outpaces our ability to adapt? The answer, frozen in Ricciardi’s photographs, is that we find out what irreversible really means.
Experience Vanishing Africa at the Science Museum’s online exhibition (sciencemuseum.org.uk) before COP30 begins. More importantly, consider what these images demand of us: not just to witness transformation, but to slow it down before more worlds vanish beyond recovery.
Sources:
The Vanishing Africa Mirella Ricciardi Archives, directed by Amina Ricciardi-Dempsey.
Press Office, The Science Museum Group.
Vanishing Africa online exhibition, curated by Dr. Roger Highfield and Dr. Julia Knights.
On the record statements from Prof. Washington Yotto Ochieng, Imperial College London.
Written by Edward Githae
