Three Gorges Dam in the Gamble Photographs

Weighing Vegetables, Sidney Gamble Photographs: 92A-513

A new exhibit entitled “Displacement: The Three Gorges Dam in Contemporary Chinese Art” opens tonight at the Nasher Museum of Art here at Duke. In the exhibit, four contemporary artists respond to the Three Gorges Dam, a project to build a hydroelectric dam across the Yangtze River, completed near Yichang, China, in 2008. Construction of the dam “displaced more than one million people and submerged more than 1,200 towns,” including some important cultural and archaeological sites.

The Sidney D. Gamble Photographs digital collection offers photographs of people, villages, and Yangtze River life around the Three Gorges and Yichang area, mostly dating from 1917 to 1919. The embedded slide show provides some selected glimpses into this vanished landscape. [To enlarge the slide show, click the rectangular button left of the Google logo.]

Additional images can be found by searching for “Yichang” or “gorge” on the Duke Digital Collections site.