This father documents what we're losing, so his children will know he tried

WHEN Sean Gallagher stood before an audience in Kuala Lumpur recently to present Witness to a Changing Planet, stories from "the front lines of climate change, environmental loss and a world in transition", he wasn't simply showing photographs.

For almost 25 years, the British environmental photojournalist and filmmaker has been travelling to places where forests disappear, rivers are poisoned, deserts advance and communities find themselves living with the consequences of a changing planet.

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His keynote at International Sustainability Week 2026, held at the Malaysia International Trade and Exhibition Centre, drew on those years of witnessing environmental change, from the Tibetan Plateau and drought-stricken India, to rising seas in Tuvalu. But the stories behind the photographs are, ultimately, about something much more intimate: people, and what happens to them when the places they call home begin to change.

It's a theme that has followed Gallagher since he was 22, long before climate change became the defining environmental conversation it is today.

That was when, as a young zoologist on a field trip in southern Brazil, he spent three weeks living at a field station deep in the Atlantic rainforest, helping to study and protect what remained of one of the world's most threatened forest ecosystems.

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Gallagher carried little more than a point-and-shoot film camera with him. He'd arrived with the instincts of a scientist, observing the forest and trying to understand what was happening to it. But somewhere among the trees, he realised ed that understanding the science was only part of the story. He could see what was happening; what he struggled to convey was what it felt like to be there.

"I needed something else," recalls Gallagher, seated beside me after his compelling keynote, looking decidedly more polished than the rugged field photographer who's spent much of his career sleeping in remote communities and venturing into some of the world's most fragile landscapes.

Yet beneath the dark blue blazer and grey trousers, that same field-hardened curiosity remains — evident in the way he talks about the places he's seen and the people he has encountered.

That realisation would quietly change the course of his life.

BEYOND BEAUTIFUL PICTURES

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Back in Britain, his mother gave him her old Canon film camera. Gallagher began teaching himself photography through library books and second-hand equipment, eventually building a darkroom at home where he'd stay up until two, three, sometimes four in the morning printing photographs after spending the day shooting.

He was hooked. What had begun as a way of expressing something science couldn't became a vocation: using photography to tell stories about what happens when human beings and the environment collide.

After an internship at Magnum Photos in London, Gallagher began to see how photography could move beyond beautiful pictures and become a way of telling stories about social, political and environmental change.

And he discovered something else about himself — that he loved the stories nobody was talking about. He'd look at a subject through the eyes of the zoologist he'd trained to be and wonder: Is anybody in the newspapers talking about this?

That question eventually took him to China.

In 2006, still young enough to take a chance on an unfamiliar country, Gallagher looked at a map and decided that China was somewhere people would want to know more about. It became home and his first major environmental project there focused on desertification — at a time when climate change and global warming were not yet the front-page subjects they are today.

He travelled thousands of kilometres through northern and western China, documenting the effects of desertification on landscapes and communities. The work was supported by the Pulitzer Centre, which backed his reporting on an environmental issue that was receiving comparatively little attention.

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It was the beginning of a pattern that would come to define his career. If an environmental crisis was distant, poorly understood or easy to overlook, Gallagher wanted to go there. And once he arrived, he wanted to find the people inside the story.

Voice low, he shares: "I'm not a nature photographer. I live in that space between human society and the environment, where they clash." Perhaps that's why, after nearly two decades of photographing some of the world's most damaged environments, it's still the people he remembers most vividly.

He remembers the smell of a place, the sound of it, the light, the faces… A photograph, says Gallagher, is never simply an image to him; it's a doorway back into a moment. One of those moments came while he was documenting industrial pollution along the Ganges in northern India.

The leather industry there, explains Gallagher, stretches back to factories established during British rule, and decades of pollution have had devastating consequences for people living and farming around the river.

He met an older man, already in his 60s, whose wife had died as a result of pollution. At first, the man spoke with the stoicism Gallagher had encountered so often among people living through hardship. Then, as he talked about his wife and his family, something gave way.

"He just broke down," remembers Gallagher.

It's the sort of moment that stays with a photographer long after the camera has been put away. "Moments like that… this is why I do it," he adds softly. "To tell those stories."

For Gallagher, an environmental story cannot simply be about melting ice caps, burning forests or endangered animals viewed from a safe distance. The scale of the climate crisis can be so vast that it becomes almost impossible to grasp.

People, however, understand people.

A polluted river becomes something different when we see the family whose lives depend upon it. A disappearing forest becomes more than a statistic when we meet the people trying to protect it, or those whose lives have already been altered by its loss.

This is where Gallagher's empathy becomes central to his work. He's conscious of the uncomfortable privilege of being able to arrive in a community, photograph what's happening and eventually leave. But he no longer believes the world's environmental crises belong only to the people living closest to them.

"I don't think any of us get to walk away anymore, really," he says simply.

For the affable Englishman, that also means refusing to portray people simply as victims.

If there's suffering, he will photograph it. But he also wants to show dignity, resistance, adaptation and resilience — the ways people continue to find a way forward even when the circumstances around them are overwhelming.

LOOK CLOSER

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That instinct runs through his work in Cambodia, where he documented deforestation and forest fires in Cambodia Burning. The story appealed to him partly because environmental destruction in Southeast Asia was receiving less international attention than similar crises elsewhere. But the way he told it was just as important as the story itself.

Rather than relying solely on conventional documentary narration, Gallagher worked with a young Cambodian poet, asking her to respond to the footage through her own feelings and words. When he saw the finished film, he cried.

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It was another reminder that there's always a new way of reaching someone. Gallagher knows he has to keep finding them because these days, he's not simply competing with newspapers, magazines or television documentaries.

He's competing with everything that flickers across our screens, all day and every day: Instagram, TikTok, YouTube, the endless scroll on our phones.

In that noisy world, a photograph has only a moment to make us stop.

Perhaps we pause because something in the light catches us. Perhaps we want to know where it was taken, who that person is, what has happened to them. Gallagher hopes that moment of curiosity will lead somewhere — to a caption, a name, a search, or a story we might otherwise never have found.

For him, the photograph is never the end of the conversation — it's simply the door. And perhaps that's why he has never been afraid of beauty, even when photographing something difficult.

Gallagher says that a beautiful image can draw us towards places we might otherwise turn away from. The beauty isn't meant to soften the horror or make it easier to bear; it's what makes us look long enough to see it.

MODEST AMBITION

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But after almost 25 years of following these stories into some of the world's most difficult places, Gallagher knows there's a price to being the one who keeps looking. There are days, he admits, when he wonders how much longer he can do it.

Assignments mean time away from his family. There have been years of travelling, sleeping in unfamiliar places, entering polluted environments and witnessing landscapes under extraordinary pressure. Sometimes, after returning to a hotel at the end of a long day, he looks through the photographs he has made and wonders why he keeps putting himself through it.

The answer, increasingly, is his children.

Gallagher has two young children, and when he thinks about the future, he doesn't imagine it in abstract terms. He wonders where they'll live, what their cities will look like, which places will still be safe and what problems they'll have to navigate when they're adults.

Those questions have become part of what drives him to keep reporting. He wants his children, one day, to look at his work and know that their father tried to do something positive with the skills he had.

It's a remarkably modest ambition for a man who has photographed presidents and prime ministers, slept in the homes of Tibetan nomads and travelled through deserts, forests and communities most people will never encounter.

But Gallagher doesn't believe photography will save the planet. He sees his work as something smaller, and perhaps more lasting. Evidence.

In 100 years, 200 years, 500 years, people may look back at this period and ask how the world changed, what happened to its forests and rivers, how communities lived through those changes and what people knew while it was happening.

Gallagher wants his photographs to be part of that record. Not simply evidence that he was there, but evidence of what was happening to people and places while the rest of the world was still trying to understand the scale of the transformation.

WAKE UP CALL

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For someone who has spent much of his life documenting environmental destruction, Gallagher is, perhaps surprisingly, a hopeful man. He credits much of that outlook to his mother, a nurse and midwife who worked in different parts of the world and somehow remained positive through it all.

Perhaps she taught him to look beyond what's broken.

He has since found that same instinct in many of the people he's met while documenting a changing planet — the quiet determination to adapt, rebuild what they can and carry on, even when the world around them is shifting.

It's a quality Gallagher believes humanity will need more than ever as he's increasingly convinced that the climate crisis is no longer a problem waiting somewhere in the future. It's already here.

"We're going to blow past 1.5°C," he says, referring to the internationally recognised climate target, his frustration palpable at how slowly the world has responded despite decades of scientific warnings.

The difficulty, he adds, is that climate change rarely arrives with one dramatic moment that makes everyone stop and pay attention. Instead, it accumulates almost quietly — a little more heat, a little less water, another forest gone, another community displaced, another river polluted — until what once seemed distant is suddenly part of everyday life.

"It's here, it's now and it's serious."

WHAT WE CHOOSE TO DO

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Perhaps that's why the camera remains so important to him. Gallagher describes it as another language, even a little passport, opening doors into places, cultures, families and communities he might otherwise never encounter.

Through the viewfinder, the world becomes a rectangle of light, geometry and possibility. He waits, watches, studies the frame and then, sometimes, everything falls into place. The moment is captured, and almost immediately he's looking for the next one.

His first paid photograph, incidentally, was a decidedly less glamorous affair: a picture of a local hotel for a newspaper, which he concedes was probably terrible. He earned about £10. More than two decades later, the thrill remains. Only now, the stories have become immeasurably larger.

When he's not on assignment, Gallagher rides. During the Covid-19 pandemic, he helped start a cycling club in Beijing that has since grown to more than 500 members. Earlier this year, he and a friend rode the length of the Great Wall, covering roughly 2,400km in nine days.

There's something of Gallagher in that restlessness — the need to keep moving and to see what lies beyond the next bend. Perhaps it's also what has carried him this far: not any illusion that he can fix everything he photographs, but the belief that there's value in bearing witness, telling the story and, above all, helping us understand one another.

For Gallagher, the camera began as a way of expressing what science couldn't. And nearly 25 years later, it has become something more. It's a way of crossing borders and differences, and of reminding us that the environmental crises we reduce to statistics are, in the end, lived by human beings.

The photographs may outlive him. He certainly hopes they will.

Long after he has stopped travelling to the places he has spent a lifetime documenting, perhaps they'll still be there, telling someone what happened: who was there, what they endured, how they adapted and what the world looked like when it was changing beneath their feet.

Because the stories Gallagher has spent his life telling aren't really about the end of the world. They're about the people living through it — and what we choose to do while there's still time.

intanm@nst.com.my

For more of Sean Gallagher's work, go to www.gallagher-photo.com.