The Edinburgh Blog

Hard Rain - The Exhibition is currently on show at Edinburgh’s Royal Botanic Garden. The exhibition is based on Mark Edwards book which matches images with lyrics from Bob Dylan’s ‘A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall’ song. Formally it is described as a “pictorial commentary of man’s impact on the planet” and it’s full title reads “Hard Rain - Remaking a World Gone Wrong”.

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A semi-circle of this free to visit, open-air exhibit is taken up by lyrics from the song below images relevant to the particular lyric. So an obvious example is a starving child accompanied with “Heard one person starve”. Contrasted with this is the next photograph, where more fortunate children play in a swimming pool while a lady stuffs herself with a hot-dog - “I heard many people laughin’”. Edwards book and this resultant exhibition has obviously had a lot of thought put into it and for the huge majority of lyrics the images are well thought out and appropriate for the image i.e. I rarely got the impression an image had just been stuck into the exhibit for the sake of completeness.

Most of the photographs and commentaries (which are displayed on another banner) are Marc Edwards’ own. Some are upsetting, like the washed up dead body of some poor man in view of the Taj Mahal, but most are thought provoking; while many will find them inspiring. Hard rain is described as “a plea to world leaders – and all citizens – to reinvent the modern world so that it is compatible with nature”. It is for exhibitions such as this to play a part, to start a debate and it certainly succeeds on this objective.

A Tree Of Hope on which hangs ribbon that visitors have written messages of support is situated by this exhibition in the Royal Botanic Garden’s Fossil Courtyard. Although this aspect of the exhibition is winding down, so no ribbon was left for The Edinburgh Blog to write a message of its own.

More photo’s from The Edinburgh Blog’s visit to Hard Rain - The Exhibition are available. Although there really is no better way to experience the exhibition than in person: it runs until January 2021, although The Tree of Hope will be removed sometime in September (I don’t think it would survive an Edinburgh Winter!).