The sequence, conceived by Koudelka for the exhibition at the Venice Biennale, presents famous and lesser-known pictures, classics of his vision and true unpublished works, and interprets on the one hand man’s power to transform the environment and on the other the destruction inherent in nature itself and in time. Made with a panoramic camera, sometimes set side by side as triptychs, the images show his extraordinary compositional instinct. Three great themes linked to destruction answer one another: the action of time on human history and the environment together with man’s abandonment; the scenes of war, with the silence of what remains after conflict; and the opposition of nature and industrial world, locked in another, no less painful conflict. The pictures span 1986 to 2012 and a vast geography across Europe and the Near East, from France to Jordan, from Libya to Slovakia, from Germany to Greece.