Silvy Crespo
The Elephant's Foot

PHOTO OXFORD OPEN CALL 2025: RUNNER UP

Faced with overlapping crises and escalating energy requirements, national governments and tech companies have turned once more to the potential of nuclear power. These efforts rely on uranium—but what is the cost of mining this resource on both landscapes and humans?

The Elephant’s Foot tells a story of death and yellow cake.

In the small mining village of Urgeiriça, Portugal, nestled beneath the Serra da Estrela (the Mountain of the Star) in the central Beiras region, radium and uranium were excavated for almost a century to produce yellow cake: uranium oxide concentrate. Throughout this time, the community was unaware of the dangers it faced; in Urgeiriça and its surroundings, an increased rate of mortality from malignant neoplasms was slowly starting to emerge.

By the time mining ceased in the 1990s, the site had given birth to an elephant’s foot: a mountain of tailings—approximately 1.39 million m3 in size—laced with traces of heavy metals. In 2001, the mine closed. Remediation measures were undertaken to mitigate its environmental impact, as well as to reduce the population’s exposure to ionizing radiation. These efforts concluded in 2021 with the capping and sealing of the tailings.

In the years since, the steady proliferation of nature has all but obscured the expansive scale of industrial contamination. Pollution moves through space and time in unpredictable ways, shaping landscapes and passing along from body to body. Shedding light on a story of slow violence, The Elephant’s Foot derives its title from the mass of corium found beneath Chernobyl’s reactor 4. This tale is testament to the continuing toll of uranium excavation, lingering on in flora and fauna long after the mines close their doors.

Since 2023, my work has involved close collaboration with a group of former uranium miners—whose families have each been affected by radioactive exposure. By sharing the delicate details of their lived experiences, members of this community hope to encourage viewers to think critically about the material foundation of our world, where short-term gains and financial incentives so often overshadow the costs of extraction for workers and mined landscapes.

Through evocative imagery and oral testimonies, this project serves as a vital counterweight to the dominant narratives upon which state authorities and industries trade: that the social and economic value of mining somehow outweighs its devastating consequences.

Born in France, Silvy Crespo (b. 1981) is a French-Portuguese photographer currently based in Paris. With a Master’s in Labour and Employment Law, she worked in the legal field for several years before establishing a creative practice; in 2020, Crespo graduated with a BA in Photography from the Royal Academy of Art The Hague (KABK). Today, her projects integrate various media, including in-depth research, photography, video, writing and archival material.
Favouring long-term projects, Crespo’s work explores issues relating to the extraction and exploitation of both human and natural resources. Started in 2019, her ongoing multi-chapter investigation focuses on little-known Portuguese communities affected by large-scale mining. Its first instalment, The Land of Elephants, was nominated for the Leica Oscar Barnack Award in 2022, as well as appearing in several international festivals (Encontros da Imagem; Imago Lisboa) and the 2022 Biennale Für Aktuelle Fotografie in Mannheim, Germany. Published by a range of platforms (De Correspondent, The Earth Issue, Photography+), Crespo’s project was also featured in the third issue of Trigger: a journal devoted to photography and visual research, published by Antwerp’s FOMU. The second instalment of Crespo's multi-chapter investigation, The Elephants Foot, is nominated for the Leica Oscar Barnack Award 2025.