Since chillies were introduced to India by Vasco da Gama in 1498, one variety has come to be most prized around the world: the deep red Guntur chilli grown in Andhra Pradesh on the south-east coast of the subcontinent. Last year, the state produced 800,000 tonnes of the product. The photographer George Steinmetz took this picture of the chilli fields in Andhra Pradesh using a drone camera. It shows the female labourers on a small family farm near Guntur sorting sun-dried rows of chillies. The women are paid about £3 a day.
Steinmetz has spent the last few years working on a project entitled Feed the Planet, which gives a visual language to the scale of food production required for a global human population that is projected to grow to nearly 10 billion by 2050. Many of his photographs, like this one, present patterns of agricultural practice that appear to knit patterns from the landscape. The satisfying bird’s eye geometry of those images – of platoons of combine harvesters bringing in the soya bean crop in Brazil or the abstract expressionist collages of seaweed production in Bali – lies in contrast with the vast and intensive surface-level industry they imply.
The photographer’s “Foodscapes” have been shortlisted in this year’s Sony world photography awards. Steinmetz thinks of himself as an “accidental environmentalist” first drawn to depicting the extraordinary ingenuity of our species as we attempt to exploit the planet’s resources for our sustenance, then disturbed by the way we “continue to chew away at the natural world” at an exponential rate. The chilli growers of Andhra Pradesh are making a living the only way they can; last year, on the farm at which Steinmetz took this picture, the crop was blighted by an insect pest. Global demand, meanwhile, continues to soar.
George Steinmetz’s Foodscapes series is shortlisted in the Sony world photography awards 2023. An exhibition of the photographs is at Somerset House, London, 14 April-1 May
