Photographs by András Zoltai
On Northeast India’s Majuli, the world’s largest river island, life unfolds in tandem with the vast, shifting waters of the Brahmaputra. For centuries, the river’s floods have shaped the island’s rhythms, its culture, and its people’s sense of place. Now, as climate change accelerates erosion and swelling monsoons, Majuli is disappearing.
This precarious landscape is the focus of Flood Me, I’ll Be Here, a new photobook by Hungarian documentary photographer András Zoltai, published by Carmencita Editions. The project, based on five years of fieldwork, is a record of and a meditation on resilience.
That resilience takes form in the book’s construction itself. Alongside 97 photographs, Zoltai includes diary fragments from on the island and a fictional text written by Indian artist Devadeep Gupta. The result underscores how Majuli’s residents model climate adaptation through ancestral knowledge.
Zoltai avoids dwelling on catastrophe. Instead, he turns his lens toward continuity and coexistence: farmers tending fields, families celebrating festivals, the sacred intimacy between land and water. “I wasn’t just documenting an island,” he said. “I was learning how people live with change—how they hold on to meaning in every action, despite the shifting environment around them.”
Editor’s Note: Flood Me, I’ll Be Here by András Zoltail is published by Carmencita Editions and is available to buy here.
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Protecting the River Island Disappearing in the Brahmaputra
Protecting the River Island Disappearing in the Brahmaputra
