From those surrounded by water and aware of its mercantile benefits, such as the Dutch of the seventeenth century with their quiet landscapes, to those in awe and fear of its power, such as Turner with his fraught seascapes, water has always been an inspiration to artists.

There are those who evoke the dreamy qualities of water, who drag you back to hours spent staring at the sea, at rain falling into puddles, at the mysterious, beautiful, captivating power of endlessly moving water. Susan Derges captures those lost moments in her beautiful abstracted work. In her 1997 series River Taw, Derges created the images in collaboration with the water by placing photographic paper on the river bed and allowing the paper to be exposed to the natural light filtering through the river water.

Other artists are equally poetic but more dangerous. Roni Horn showed the cold, choppy river in her 1995 work Some Thames, evoking a more dangerous, unpredictable side to water with her full-frame, repetitive images of the steely, fast-flowing river.

Then there are those whose images of water start political debates, who evoke apocalyptic futures, depicting those who have nothing to drink, those who have nothing to cook or wash with, those whose homes have been destroyed and washed away. As climate change takes hold and fresh water shortages become a very real fear for people across the globe, images of water take on a new poignancy.

In After the Flood, Robert Polidori’s moving images of New Orleans, he demonstrates with haunting clarity the after-effects of a natural disaster and the power of water to destroy and disrupt our existence. Yet he also finds a grim beauty in empty waterlogged rooms framed with peeling wallpaper and populated with domestic furniture pushed up to the walls in nervous-seeming clusters by the force of the water.

Carl de Keyzer’s photographs of the British coastline, Moments before the Flood, show beautiful coastal seascapes, the imagery linked inexorably to traditional landscape painting. Yet one glance at the dramatic title leads you to look at the work not as an exploration of nature, but as a political statement about climate change. With a sense of loss, you envisage sea levels rising and those coastal landscapes changing forever, footage of destroyed communities from the Asian tsunami to New Orleans running through your mind.

Edward Burtynsky’s work seeks to bring what he believes is a crisis in the lack of safe water to the attention of world leaders and the world’s populace. In a statement from his shortlisted entry in the Prix Pictet, a photography competition focused on those who make images about sustainability, and which this year is concerned specifically with water, he says, I no longer see my world as delineated by countries, with borders or language but as 6.5 billion humans living off a single finite planet. Just as the eventual depletion of global oil reserves will have a profound effect on world economies […] our drinking water will have a fundamental impact on our very sustenance. The basic need for fresh water, like air and sunlight, is not a lifestyle choice, it’s a matter of survival.

At WaterAid we are working with photographic artists to start debate and discussion on this very issue: water as a necessity, as a basic human right. We work mainly with reportage photographers to document the problems that the lack of water and sanitation brings to the seventeen countries in which we work in Africa and Asia, but also have several collaborative projects with fine artists underway. We understand the power of imagery to convey a message. We use images by photographic artists at once to paint an illustrative picture which will raise funds and awareness, and also to capture the attention of those who can really make big changes in policy and advocacy work.

On a recent trip to Madagascar, we worked with fine artist Pierrot Men, a photographer who has exhibited across Africa and Europe. We took him to some of the places in which we work and allowed him to document how the lack of clean water and sanitation affects the lives of those who live in those communities. His powerful images show that life is tough, but also bring across the personalities of those who live there as they work, play games, laugh with each other and enjoy family life. It’s easy to always show the negative side of life without water, but also important not to make those who live without it into victims.

When creating imagery to be used to change policy, sometimes working with local communities can be just as effective as working with artists. WaterAid ran a project in Madagascar, one of the poorest countries in which we work, in which children in one village were given cameras to photograph their lives. The resulting images were sometimes humorous, sometimes beautiful, and sometimes shocking as the children innocently documented their normal lives. These images were used by our Madagascan office to lobby the local government to change its policies regarding clean water and hygienic sanitation provision.

Water is an inarguable human right, an enabler of life. Issues related to water increasingly cross the global cultural, social and political divides. The lack of fresh water, rising sea levels, the depletion of sea life, pollution, the spread of disease — these are issues that are no longer just the problem of Africa and Asia, these are issues that are increasingly affecting the west as well.

By creating powerful imagery we can’t make people smell the stench in the slums that we work in, we can’t make them taste water from pools also used as toilets by humans and animals. But we can illustrate a problem in a way that might compel someone to make a change for the better, we can paint a picture of a future that looks bleak enough to spur someone into action, we can illustrate in one arresting image problems too huge to explain in one thousand words.