"The photograph haunts me, and the experience haunts me. There was little I could do to intervene" – Zed Nelson discusses his award-winning project

It’s titled The Anthropocene Illusion. Some people really know what that means, and some have no idea. Scientists today are calling that we name a new epoch, and it's called Anthropocene, which means ‘age of human’.

So they're suggesting that we declare an ‘age of human’, which kind of nods towards the impact that humans are having on planet Earth.

In the last 200 years since the Industrial Revolution, we've had a dramatic, world-shattering impact on the planet that will be measurable for millions of years to come in the rock under our feet. It will be in nuclear isotopes and the fallout from the fossil fuel burning, chicken bones that we eat, and cement from the cities that we build.

So that rule is going to be evidence for millions of years; that's the Anthropocene part.

The Illusion part of it is that, as humans, we've divorced ourselves from nature and increasingly damaged or destroyed the natural world. We've created an illusion to retreat into, this artificial, choreographed, curated version of nature, which is a sanitized version.

It's made safe, like a consumer experience, and it's there to make us feel better, give us a connection to something that we've lost. That's essentially what the project is about.

I suppose as a photographer, you're always trying to work out how you can respond to important issues that are surrounding you. There was a feeling that, more and more, the environment is a key issue, and the question was, how do you make work about that? Work that isn't like everything that's already been done or kind of cliched views.

So I think I came up with this idea of looking at it from a different angle, where it kind of questioned the human behavior and psychology at a time of crisis. Actually showing these artificial constructs, they almost become like monuments to the very thing that we've lost, the things that we've destroyed.

Hopefully that's quite a good way of focusing people's attention and making people consider what is important, what's worth protecting.

Around ten years ago I went to a place in Norway and there was a seal in an artificial kind of sea world attraction. This was in the far north of Norway, and as I looked at it I thought, I'm in this sort of fiberglass fake Arctic world with a captive seal, but actually the sea and the arctic is only a stone's throw away.

I couldn't really understand why that creature was living in those conditions. Without knowing at that time, I think that was a kind of early inspiration for the project; it certainly got me thinking about it.

It just was weird and it felt wrong. I suppose people want convenience, they want nature brought to them on a plate, which you know, you can argue the ethics of it, but if it replaces the real thing, then it becomes a real problem.

Even the national parks in America, they're beautiful, but millions of visitors flock to them in their cars with their air conditioners running, take a picture out the window with their iPhone, sometimes literally never leave their vehicle, get their fix of what they think is nature and untouched wilderness, then go back to their desktop thinking all is well.

I love National Parks and long may they survive. They have their place but they shouldn't be all that we have left; and even they're under attack now. That's the chilling thing: in America, for instance, these places are under attack.

The project is well researched. I did a lot of research over a lot of time, so you build up a list of potential things to shoot, but then actually it comes almost a problem. You can have too much research, you kind of bury yourself and you think, well, what's worth doing?

You research, come up with ideas, do a hit list, try and research what's possible and then go somewhere and give yourself enough time to have an open mind and explore it. But have really good ideas about what what you're gonna do as well, what you're looking for. Also then take a little bit of time and not rush in and out.

Yeah, exactly, and I think that's part of getting caught up in wanting to do things quickly and conveniently. So sometimes I make it more inconvenient for myself. I'll park myself in front of the scene for like one or two days and stay there and then I'll stay in the hotel and then I'll go back again in the morning.

People say, well, surely you've done it. Surely that's enough. But when you stand still long enough, things happen around you. That's what I've noticed in photography. You can identify the potential for a great image and then it's a matter of waiting for those elements to come together.

Years of developing work and years of documentary work. You work, you improve, you focus, you think, you work out what works for you, and what doesn't. You refine your style and editing skills.

There's all of that as a background, which everybody has to go through – the quicker you start the better, really – but it's all a necessary learning curve and I've certainly been on a learning curve. I didn't magically take great pictures!

You know then the photographs might be good, but then you have to analyze – are they achieving what you want? Are they telling the story? Are they telling the true story? They might be sensational. They might be impactful. They might be dramatic. But for me that was never enough, and that was never my priority.

I didn't want to just capture spectacular moments. I wanted to tell stories and develop themes and make thought-provoking work; so then it gets harder.

Then you look at your work at a certain stage in your career and you think, well they're good photos, people think they're good, but I don't feel they're being read in the right way or they're more of the same.

They're too much like photographs that have gone before them. They're too familiar. They're from the documentary tradition, but they don't make people think, they just make people feel like they're good and familiar images.

After several years photographing in conflict areas, where the subjects were very important to me, and there was an element of life or death, that was when I found that the work I was making wasn't achieving what I wanted. I felt like it was almost reinforcing stereotypes about different countries, and for me that was a problem.

I had a very marked shift in my approach and style. That was about the time that I did my first book, Gun Nation, which was about American gun culture. Instead of looking at the developing world and looking at the terrible problems and conflicts that were besetting those countries, I started looking at Western countries.

The problems, issues, and the awful things that were taking place within our borders, so that was how Gun Nation came about. The staggering death toll of over 30,000 people shot and killed every year in America.

I started doing landscapes mixed in with the portraits and the reportage, and I started using text alongside images in a more interesting way, particularly in the book where I combined texts, poems, and extracts from novels. It was a way of layering the work in a more interesting way.

Also the way I use the images, these carefully lit portraits might be juxtaposed against a kind of very gritty reportage image, next to another image of a sort of beautifully photographed gun.

The images were sort of jarring and were purposefully juxtaposed to create tension and disrupt the way you look at the images. So that was an important time and change and I've continued doing that ever since.

I'm always looking. I'm doing a lot of research as well as thinking about my subject a lot and the more thoughtful you are the more I think it gets translated into the Images. As you take time and you return to things, I think that slowly gets baked into your work.

Yes, I mean, the project is about the human divorce from the natural world and our impact on it, how we've devastated it, but at the same time, how we create artificial, choreographed versions of it.

So yes, I had to sort of often pretend I was a tourist, quite literally dress as a tourist and enter theme parks, zoos, safari parks and airports, all of these kinds of places where consumers go. National parks, I went on safari in Africa – I wanted to sort of arrive as if I were one of the consumers, but to look at it in a different way, to look at it with great attention to detail and with a more critical eye.

There were images of animals like the polar bear in confinement in China, which I found very depressing to watch this bear pacing its life away in a fiberglass arctic fake environment. I found it very painful to watch, and I spent two days photographing it in that space; it haunts me. The photograph haunts me, and the experience haunts me.

There was little I could do to intervene. I wrote to many of the facilities that I photographed, complaints and letters begging for them to improve their conditions. I hope that the work, in its own way, helps stimulate awareness and drives a conversation about our impact on the natural world and on other animals.

I had to do a walk with lions tourist experience in South Africa. I don't approve of that. Taking lions away from their mothers when they're days old, bottle feeding them on milk and making them tame so tourists can have petting experiences with lion cubs, then later walk with them when they're juveniles.

I don't approve of that, but I joined a group in order to photograph it, and it seemed like a necessary thing to do in order to get the images of the very thing itself.

I went to endless theme parks and Disneyland Africa, Disney's version of Africa, and I spent days in these places. Tropical Islands, a holiday resort in Germany, a fake beach, and an indoor rainforest. Mainly, I just found them kind of alienating places, quite tedious in a way. I watched holiday makers and I wondered why and how it was enough to be in a place like that.

Going on safari in Kenya was a pleasant experience, however. You know, these are beautiful places. You can see wild animals. So I'm not trying to sort of criticize the individual safari outfits. It's more, my concern is that people going on safari.

It's such a stage-managed experience that they're given this sort of reassuring view of nature that all is well, and these animals are thriving. But actually you know their natural habitats are being massively diminished, and these are the last survivors of their species.

So, I'm much more interested in the kind of big overview picture, not to criticize individual places.

You just start without overthinking it. I wrote the heading of a project on an empty Word document, I started gathering some thoughts. I wrote a list of things that I thought might be interesting to get started with.

I then started researching and adding to that document, taking photographs from the internet, extracts from books, and research articles. I started gathering material.

That document is now two and a half thousand pages long! It's a Word document with images, compiled lists, ideas and thoughts about potential avenues to pursue. Before you know it, you're deep in a project, but you're still questioning: is it a good one? Is it going to work? Is it possible?

Then you just keep going, putting one foot in front of the other, and before you know it, you're halfway through, with all the agonies and even more questions. How do you continue to fund it? Is it going to be of interest to people? Is it making sense?

These are the hard questions, and all you can do is push yourself to ignore those low moments and plan the next part of the project. I have lulls and I have moments where I take my eye off the ball and do something else or get distracted, and that's normal. It's okay as long as you get back on track sooner or later.

That's also why the project ends up taking so long, because you're looking at ways of funding it, of keeping sane, of finding other work along the way. That's why it necessitates shooting it over a long period of time. But I also think the project improves and benefits from that time. It gives you more time to think, reflect, change it, adapt it, and improve it.

You basically have to be your own boss, and you have to be tough with yourself and self-motivated.

Sometimes you just kind of know, you feel like you've done enough. It's like it's been a long process, and you think now this story is done, it works, it tells its story. There's always more to do, there are always more possibilities, but you just have a feeling that that's it.

With Gun Nation, my first book, I remember feeling like I couldn't continue, I'd done enough because I was getting argumentative with the people I was interviewing and photographing. I couldn't stay silent any more.

I felt like I'd covered the subject, and I wanted it to be published as well. I wanted people to see it. The same with this project. It's time to have it in the world. It needs to be part of the bigger debate about our sort of fraught relationship with the natural world, and what we humans are doing to it, and how we have divorced ourselves from it.

There are key environmental questions in the air at the moment. We're having a crisis of leadership; our political leaders are failing us dismally, our business leaders are failing us, and more importantly, wantonly destroying the environment. It's time to try and work out how we can value nature, put a value on it, so it doesn't all just get destroyed.

When I was doing my last book, Love Me, which was about the global beauty industry, I felt like it could go on forever. There was always more, and actually it was my mom who said, “Please stop. You've done enough”. So, in that case, it was someone totally not from the photography industry who said I think you've done it.

But essentially, you're looking for a moment where you feel like you've done the best you can, and it's ready, it's ready to call it complete.