Grasping the magnitude of China's most recent monument, the Three Gorges Dam, requires a plane ticket or a significant imaginative leap. Built over 15 years, it has consumed 10.5 billion tons of concrete and, when completed in 2009, will have displaced more than 1.3 million people and submerged 13 cities, 140 towns, 1,351 villages and 74,100 acres of cultivated land. Those are just a sample of the statistics booted about in a little catalog accompanying "Three Gorges," a sobering show of riveting photos on view at the Minnesota Center for Photography (MCP) through Feb. 10. What distinguishes these Three Gorges photos from those that appear regularly in news accounts of the dam's progress is their simultaneous grasp of monumentality and intimacy, coupled with an undercurrent of inevitable disaster.

Perhaps the photographers didn't intend to imply impending doom, but so many elements suggest it: the milky, polluted air that masks so many vistas; ant-sized humans swarming over gargantuan equipment; swirls of thick debris dislodged by rising water; an entire city reduced to rubble in eight weeks; displaced children tagged like lost luggage. As depicted in the 80-some photos on view at MCP, the Three Gorges dam has unleashed a relentless disaster, a slow-moving, steadily-rising, manmade horror that is creeping inexorably across a haunted landscape.

"I tried to get work that delved into the social realities of the situation, the impact on lives, and not just the look of the dam," said George Slade, MCP's artistic director.

Slade organized the show with the assistance of Jamason Chen, a Chinese-born technology specialist at the University of Minnesota.

Slade and Chen went to China in September 2006, cruised part of the Yangtze and met photographers who had been documenting the project and its impact on residents. Ultimately, Slade chose work by 11 Chinese and 11 Westerners, including Jeff Austin of St. Paul and Chuck Koosmann of Afton.

Austin's color images convey something of the dam's monumentality. Taken in 2002, they are classic industrial photos featuring long lines of colorful trucks filled with rubble beside a murky lake, huge towers dwarfing hard-hatted dam workers, a gargantuan crane looming over a landscape punctuated with trestles and earthen pyramids. Koosman's more scenic images -- of befogged bluffs, toylike constructions and a new town stretching across a bleak hillside like a fragile house of cards -- carry an otherworldly sense of emptiness and alienation.

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Among the Chinese photographers, the fishing photos of Zhang De Li are particularly disturbing. He documents the 2004 "catch" landed by Cleaning Teams 1, 2 and 3, former fishermen who are now employed to net the logjams of trash, branches and other debris rising from submerged villages or torn from cliffs buffeted by the surging water. Their enormous reed baskets, once filled with shimmering silvery fish, now overflow with bristling junk.

Human debris litters the shores, too, as He Chuan shows in his series of "Emigrant Wharf" photos from 2003. Hundreds of people, many wearing neck tags, crowd a long stairway in the ancient town of Fengjie or wait anxiously on the town's docks. From there they were, like He Chuan himself, sent off to new towns, sometimes accompanied by their families and possessions, sometimes not.

U.S.-born photographer James Whitlow Delano, who now lives in Tokyo, captured something of the horror-film strangeness of the dislocations in his 2003 series "The Last Spring Before the Flood." In one image, a mountain of rubble flows lava-like into a darkened alley where a solitary child gambols in front of the cascade of dirt and rocks. In another, a solitary couple crouch on the edge of a ghostly reservoir behind the dam. Shadowed by dark halos, Delano's spectral images echo with nightmarish emptiness.

In two large color photos, Edward Burtynsky of Toronto documents the destruction of Fengjie, where in just eight weeks centuries of habitation, including tile-roofed hovels and modern highrises, were leveled. Loneliness seems to haunt everyone pictured here, whether it be the three young people whom Yan Chang Jiang found huddled under a pale blue umbrella on a rocky cliff in Chongqing, or the flag-waving tour guide whom Zhang San You photographed herding visitors in Baidi City in 2005.

Glimpses of crumbling slums and mold-slimed walls suggest that life in old China was no picnic. But there is no great leap forward in the new China portrayed here.

mabbe@startribune.com • 612-673-4431