When a Lake Begins to Forget

A personal journey into the changing heart of Lake Velence

There are places we visit.

And then there are places that somehow become part of us.

For generations of Hungarians, Lake Velence has been one of those places.

Children learned to swim in its warm, shallow water. Families spread blankets along its shores and stayed until the evening light turned gold. Fishermen pushed small wooden boats through the reeds before sunrise, returning to the same quiet corners their fathers—and sometimes their grandfathers—had known.

Birdwatchers came for another reason.

They came for the rustle in the reeds.

For the sudden beating of wings.

For herons standing motionless in the shallows and the extraordinary web of life supported by one of Hungary’s most familiar wetlands.

And people like me came simply because we loved it.

But this summer, I returned to Lake Velence and found myself looking at something I wasn’t prepared to see.

The lake seemed to be disappearing.

Not everywhere.

Not all at once.

That somehow made it more unsettling.

It was happening quietly.

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Where Water Used to Be

The heat had been relentless.

The air itself seemed tired.

Walking toward the lake, I could smell the reeds warming beneath the sun and feel the dry earth under my feet. Where I expected water, there were stretches of exposed lakebed.

Mud had hardened.

Then cracked.

Then cracked again.

Patterns spread across the earth like an enormous mosaic.

At first, they were beautiful.

That is perhaps the most uncomfortable part of being a conservation photographer: sometimes environmental distress can be extraordinarily beautiful.

I found myself photographing textures that looked almost otherworldly.

Some resembled ancient maps.

Others looked like skin.

From above, small remaining pools of water appeared like cells viewed beneath a microscope. Narrow channels wound through the mud like arteries.

The photographer in me was fascinated.

The human being in me was deeply disturbed.

Because every beautiful pattern represented something missing.

Water.

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Then I Found the Boats

That was when the story changed for me.

Along the old shoreline were small wooden fishing boats.

Except they weren’t floating.

They were sitting in grass.

Some were surrounded by reeds.

Others rested beside cracked earth where water once reached them.

There was something almost unbearable about seeing a boat stranded on land.

A boat has a purpose.

It is meant to move.

To carry someone across water.

To rock gently against a dock.

To leave before sunrise with a fisherman and return later with stories.

These boats were waiting for water that was no longer there.

I stood looking at one of them for a long time.

And I began thinking about the fishermen.

Not as statistics.

As people.

People who know this lake differently than the rest of us.

They know where fish gather when the temperature changes. They recognize the wind before a storm. They know the hidden channels through the reeds.

Imagine knowing a lake that intimately and watching its shoreline retreat.

What do you tell your grandchildren?

“When I was your age, the water came all the way up here.”

At what point does a memory begin to sound like a legend?

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The Lake From Above

Then I launched my drone.

And everything changed again.

From the ground, drought is something you walk through.

From the sky, it becomes a story.

The landscape opened beneath me.

The remaining water separated into irregular pools surrounded by vast reed beds. Channels twisted between them. Pale mineral deposits traced the former edges of water.

And across the exposed lakebed were patterns so intricate that they hardly seemed natural.

I kept flying.

And I kept thinking:

How can something this beautiful also be a warning?

Perhaps nature does not separate beauty from suffering the way humans do.

Perhaps it simply responds.

Water retreats.

Plants adapt.

Birds move.

Fish search for deeper places.

Mud dries.

Seeds wait.

Nature does what it has always done.

It tries to survive.

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A Lake With a Long Memory

Lake Velence is not simply a recreational lake.

It is a shallow, dynamic natural system whose water levels have fluctuated throughout its history. There have been dry periods before. There have been recoveries.

That history matters.

We should resist the temptation to look at one frightening summer and declare that the lake is dying forever.

Nature is more complicated than that.

But history should not become an excuse to look away, either.

Because today’s lake exists in a different world.

Hotter periods, evaporation, rainfall patterns, water management, surrounding development and human demand all intersect with the natural rhythms of a shallow lake.

The question is therefore not simply:

Has Lake Velence ever been low before?

It has.

The more important question is:

How resilient will Lake Velence be in the climate and landscape of the future?

That is a much harder question.

And perhaps the most important one.

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What Happens to the Birds?

Standing among the reeds, I kept thinking about the creatures that cannot attend meetings or argue about water policy.

Wetlands are extraordinarily productive ecosystems.

To us, a patch of reeds may simply look like vegetation.

To a bird, it may be shelter.

A nesting site.

A hunting ground.

A nursery.

To insects, amphibians and fish, shallow water can represent an entire world.

Remove enough water and those relationships begin to change.

Some species move.

Some adapt.

Some cannot.

This is one reason conservation is rarely about saving one beautiful animal.

It is about protecting relationships.

Water.

Mud.

Reeds.

Fish.

Insects.

Birds.

People.

Pull hard enough on one thread and eventually the entire fabric changes.

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Then It Rained

The following afternoon, something happened.

Rain.

Not enough to restore a lake.

Not remotely.

Just a brief summer shower.

But I couldn’t resist.

I drove back to the same place.

I wanted to know if anything had changed.

There was water again in some of the shallow channels.

Tiny ribbons of it.

The cracked earth reflected the sky.

And then evening came.

The clouds opened near the horizon and the entire landscape began to glow.

Pink.

Orange.

Gold.

The remaining water caught the light and carried it through the marsh.

I launched the drone again.

From above, Lake Velence no longer looked simply wounded.

For a few minutes, it looked luminous.

Alive.

And standing there, I was reminded of something I have learned repeatedly while photographing nature:

Resilience rarely announces itself loudly.

Sometimes it is a seed waiting underground.

Sometimes it is a bird returning.

Sometimes it is a tiny stream finding its way through cracked mud.

And sometimes it is a lake catching the last light of the day.

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What Are We Willing to Notice?

Jane Goodall has spent much of her life reminding the world that hope is not passive.

Hope requires action.

I think that distinction matters enormously here.

Hope does not mean looking at Lake Velence and saying:

“It has recovered before. Everything will be fine.”

Hope means asking:

What can we do to give it the best possible chance to recover again?

And there is another idea I kept returning to, one that echoes through the work of Dr. Wayne Dyer:

Our attention matters.

What we choose to notice begins to shape what we value.

And what we value, we are far more likely to protect.

Perhaps that is one of photography’s quiet powers.

A photograph cannot refill a lake.

It cannot make rain fall.

It cannot write environmental policy.

But it can make someone stop.

Look.

Feel.

Ask a question.

And sometimes that is where change begins.

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The Families Who Will Come After Us

I keep thinking about the children.

Not only the children playing beside Lake Velence today.

The ones who haven’t been born yet.

Will they swim here?

Will their parents bring towels and sandwiches and spend entire summer afternoons beside the water?

Will fishermen still push small boats through openings in the reeds before sunrise?

Will birdwatchers still raise binoculars when wings suddenly lift from the marsh?

Will photographers still stand here at sunset waiting for the sky to catch fire?

I don’t know.

None of us does.

But perhaps that uncertainty is exactly why this moment matters.

Conservation is ultimately an act of imagination.

We have to imagine a future we may never personally see.

And then care enough to protect it anyway.

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Bearing Witness

I originally went to Lake Velence carrying cameras.

I thought I was going there to photograph a landscape.

Instead, the landscape gave me a story.

A story written in cracked mud.

In abandoned boats.

In reeds.

In tiny pools of remaining water.

In fishermen’s memories.

In birds searching the shallows.

And finally, after a brief summer rain, in a magnificent sunset reflected across a wounded landscape.

These photographs may look like abstract art.

Some resemble paintings.

Some resemble another planet.

But they are not abstractions.

They are Lake Velence.

Right now.

And this project has become something much more important to me than a collection of photographs.

It has become an act of witnessing.

Because perhaps the greatest danger isn’t that a landscape changes.

Nature has always changed.

Perhaps the greater danger is that change happens slowly enough that we become accustomed to it.

The shoreline moves a little farther away.

The boats sit a little longer in the grass.

The channels become a little narrower.

And eventually we forget where the water once was.

I don’t want to forget.

So I photographed it.

And I am sharing what I saw.

Because sometimes photography is about celebrating the extraordinary beauty of our planet.

And sometimes it is about standing beside something we love while it is changing and saying:

I see you.

You matter.

And your story deserves to be told.

— Zsuzsanna Luciano
Conservation Fine Art Photographer
Lake Velence, Hungary — Summer 2026