Drawing inspiration from the natural world, this photo series creates an analogy for the cycles and collapses of major empires throughout human history. Each photograph features a crumbling autumn leaf with hints from historical maps, symbolizing the ending chord of a great empire.

Over the course of the last four thousand years, empires have kept rising and falling. Great superpowers that determined the world’s order and ruled over almost every piece of land on the globe, have lost their supremacy and collapsed again and again as a kind of inevitable cycle. The decadent process that accompanied each and every collapsing empire had its warning signs- tyranny, corruption, internal conflicts and overuse of natural resources are some of the reasons that led them to fall and end their historic role.

In the digital world of today, confrontations between the world’s superpowers of our times never cease. In the past few years we have witnessed climate change, a global pandemic, mass migration waves, the collapse of financial systems, threats to democracy, technologies that are rapidly taking over our lives and even the blurring of the boundaries between truth and falsehood. All these developments lead to a very uncertain future. If the superpowers of today are here to stay, they would need to keep up with the changes and find the solutions to adjust to this present moment. Otherwise we might face another period in human history marked by the fall of empires, as they would quietly join the empires of the past, drying out and crumbling between the pages of an old book.