curated theme
LANDSCAPE
LANDSCAPE
When we speak of “landscape,” we rarely mean what is directly before us. The word more often sends the mind elsewhere toward an idealized, distant place shaped by beauty, scale, and promise. Guidebooks, postcards, and canonical photographs have trained us to expect landscape as something elevated and removed. As Roland Barthes observed in his critique of Le Guide Bleu, such representations do not simply describe places; they mystify them. Monumental photographs by figures like Ansel Adams reinforce this distance, asking for reverence rather than presence. To go there oneself requires time, risk, and commitment. Thanks to photography, we are offered another option: to remain where we are, viewing from afar, through a glowing screen or a printed surface. We can experience beauty, wildness, terror, or mystery without fully entering their conditions.
August Sander, Rhineland Landscapes, 1974
Image Courtesy: Feldschuh Gallery
Robert Adams, Malheur National Forest, south of John Day, Grant County, Oregon, US, 1999.
Image Courtesy: prix.pictet.com/
¨Clear-cutting is a controversial forestry practice in which most or all trees in an area are uniformly cut down. More than 90 per cent of the original forest in the American Northwest has been clear-cut at least once. The large stumps in these pictures are remnants of ancient woods where trees commonly grow to be five hundred or more years old.¨ said
Robert Adams.
Source: Prix Pictet
Source: Prix Pictet
If we zoom out across a longer span of time, this distance begins to look historically produced rather than natural. For much of human history, land was not conceived as an external object but as a lived environment - inhabited, worked, feared, and cared for. Early societies understood themselves as embedded within ecological systems rather than positioned above them. Over time, and especially under modern Western ideologies shaped by religion, state power, colonial expansion, and capitalism, land increasingly became territory: measured, bordered, owned, extracted from. Our relationship to it shifted from participation to management, from kinship to control.
Landscape photography emerges within this altered relationship. It does not merely depict land; it records how land has been seen, claimed, and transformed. Every image carries traces of the visible and the invisible: history, labor, displacement, memory, desire. In this sense, landscape is never neutral. It is shaped by borders and inheritance, scarred by industry, cultivated and fenced, burned, worshipped, abandoned. To photograph land is already to negotiate with power: who occupies it, who is excluded from it, and who is allowed to define what it means.
Thomas Struth, Landscape No 34, Maisacker nach der Ernte, Winterthur (1993)
Image Courtesy: Mutual Art
Yet some photographers resist this inherited distance. Rather than standing apart, they enter the landscape fully, allowing themselves to be affected by it. Their work recalls Rimbaud’s The Drunken Boat: a vessel no longer steering but being carried, its wide eyes absorbing everything as it drifts through uncertainty. In such practices, vision becomes immersion. The landscape is no longer a view to be admired but a force that demands emotional, ethical, and political reckoning. To enter it is to accept risk of losing control, of being changed.
This issue gathers works that live within this tension. The landscapes presented here are not static scenes but active sites of memory, conflict, longing, and identity. They document land as it is lived, contested, and imagined, while also revealing each photographer’s personal negotiation with place. These terrains are unfinished. They continue to shift under our feet, insisting that we return to them not as tourists, but as participants. The land looks back. It remembers what we try to forget. It asks something of us.
This issue gathers works that live within this tension. The landscapes presented here are not static scenes but active sites of memory, conflict, longing, and identity. They document land as it is lived, contested, and imagined, while also revealing each photographer’s personal negotiation with place. These terrains are unfinished. They continue to shift under our feet, insisting that we return to them not as tourists, but as participants. The land looks back. It remembers what we try to forget. It asks something of us.
Sophie Ristelhueber, Fait, 1992
Image Courtesy: sophie-ristelhueber.format.com/
“People will go in, see photographs of landscapes, and when they get closer they’ll see that they’re landscapes with problems”, says Sophie Ristelhueber of the series Fait (Fact), which abandons the documentary for the aesthetic in its approach to questions of land and territory. The aerial photographs disturb our perception of the landscape and blur the line between macrocosm and microcosm as views become map-like. In these images dating from 1991, the artist – always fascinated by the notion of trace – records the scars in the Kuwait desert, the wounds inflicted on the land by the Gulf War.
Source: Centre Pompidou
Source: Centre Pompidou
Perhaps this is why certain landscapes refuse to let us go. They carry echoes of who we were and outlines of who we might become. To encounter them is never just to look, it is to be implicated.
Suffo Moncloa, So Far There Is One Car, 2016
Image Credit: Photobook titled 17 8 176 8 6 (EVIDENCES) published in 2018
Is there a certain type of landscape that has especially inspired you to photograph?
Do particular landscapes resonate with the emotional or political core of your work?
01. Study
Image Credit: Screenshot from The Bride Came C.O.D., shot in infrared, 1941
Infrared photography extends beyond the limits of human vision, recording wavelengths of light that sit just outside the visible spectrum. First explored in the early twentieth century by physicist Robert Wood, whose experimental images were published in 1910, the technique initially demanded long exposure times. As a result, landscapes became its natural subject. These early photographs revealed an unfamiliar world where foliage glowed and skies darkened, not as stylistic effects but as physical responses to light itself.
Image Credit: Weegee, Infrared Theater Series, 1940-44, on Christie´s
Image Credits:
Though there had been infrared spectrograms produced before 1910, as far as we know the first infrared images in print were taken by Professor Robert Williams Wood and published in the October 1910 Photographic Journal of the Royal Photographic Society (RPS).
Infrared radiation was discovered in 1800 and today has a multitude of applications including the laser in your CD player and those remote controls for your TV that always vanish down the back of the sofa. Infrared imaging is widely used, though primarily in other fields away from artistic photography such as forensics, medical and scientific imaging and astronomy.
Infrared radiation was discovered in 1800 and today has a multitude of applications including the laser in your CD player and those remote controls for your TV that always vanish down the back of the sofa. Infrared imaging is widely used, though primarily in other fields away from artistic photography such as forensics, medical and scientific imaging and astronomy.
Source: BBC
Infrared soon moved from experimentation to strategy. During World War I, and later World War II, the US military expanded its use of infrared imaging as a surveillance and reconnaissance tool. Its ability to penetrate atmospheric haze, smoke, and toxic gas allowed clearer distinctions between water, vegetation, and built structures. The land, seen through infrared, became readable in new ways, transforming photography into an instrument of power, mapping, and control. In the 1930s, companies like Kodak released infrared film commercially, making the technique available beyond military and scientific contexts.
Image Credit: Pauline Rook, Near Buckland Mill, www.bhaam.org.uk
Image Credit: Statue of Perseus, The Great Cascade, Peterhof, St Petersburg, Russia ©Simon Marsden
By the late 1960s, infrared photography entered popular culture. Musicians and artists such as Jimi Hendrix and the Grateful Dead adopted its surreal, high-contrast imagery for album covers, drawn to its otherworldly colors and altered perception of reality. Today, infrared no longer depends on specialized film. Digital cameras and filters have made the medium widely accessible, yet its defining visual signature remains rooted in what is known as the Wood Effect: the brightening of vegetation caused by the way plant matter reflects infrared light. What began as a scientific experiment continues to reshape how we see, and imagine, the landscape.
Image Credit: Infrared view of the Empire State Building probably taken in the 1950s
Illustration: Photograph: Weegee (Arthur Fellig)/ICP/Getty Images
Image Credit: Kohei Yoshiyuki, Untitled [Plate 06], 1971, Yossi Milo
Kohei once described his solo exhibition setup during a conversation with Araki Yoshiyuki: “I turned out all the lights in the space and gave each visitor a flashlight. In this way, I was reconstructing the original conditions. I also enlarged the photographs to life size. I wanted people to look at the bodies in the photographs an inch at a time. But this is an uneasy situation. When it’s completely dark, the whole photograph is illuminated, but the viewer looks at it section by section. My original concept involved a corridor where points of light would be focused on the photographs. Viewers would look at them slowly . . . carefully. They might even touch the photos. That’s how I wanted to exhibit them. But then I realized that viewers would suffer if I forced them to look at the photographs in that way. So, that time I just used a board as a partition in the middle of the space.”
Image Credit: Karl Ferris, Psychedelic Experience Album Cover, 1967
With Jimi, for instance, when we chose to do this album cover in June ’67, I decided to go all out on this. I used my psychedelic infrared technique, picked out the outfits, and Jimi had this incredible wardrobe. He said, “well, I got a bunch of clothes here” and he opened up his cupboard. The first thing that jumped out at me was a jacket with psychedelic eyes on it. It had been painted by, incidentally, Mick Jagger's brother Chris Jagger, who was an artist, and painted it for Jimi. I said, “this is what we use.” Jimi said okay, and he pulled it out. He called it his ‘gypsy eyes jacket’. I said “yes, that's it.”
Because of my previous experience I knew how the infrared colour film reacted to the foliage. So we went out in June, which is like maximum foliage development time, everything is very green and bursting with photosynthesis, which my special technique captures. It takes a photograph almost like aura photography; it gets a kind of glow to it too.
I said “if we wanna make this picture really freaky, I wanna make a intense psychedelic fish-eye three dimensional picture, and make it really freak out.
Source: Hyper Gallery
Because of my previous experience I knew how the infrared colour film reacted to the foliage. So we went out in June, which is like maximum foliage development time, everything is very green and bursting with photosynthesis, which my special technique captures. It takes a photograph almost like aura photography; it gets a kind of glow to it too.
I said “if we wanna make this picture really freaky, I wanna make a intense psychedelic fish-eye three dimensional picture, and make it really freak out.
Source: Hyper Gallery
Image Credit: Elliott Landy, Bob Dylan, outside his Byrdcliffe
home, infrared color film, Woodstock, NY, 1968
Irish filmmaker and photographer Richard Mosse is known for his use of infrared film to depict conflict zones, most notably in the Democratic Republic of Congo. By rendering vegetation in unnatural tones, his images transform familiar landscapes into disquieting, otherworldly spaces where beauty and violence coexist. Across his practice, Mosse examines war through its impact on land and displacement, working across regions from Central Africa to the Balkans, the US - Mexico border, and the edges of Europe.
Florian Maier-Aichen’s digitally altered photographs sit between landscape, drawing, and fiction. Embracing chance through light leaks, double exposures, and digital intervention, he creates images that feel visually convincing while remaining deliberately illogical. Often working from elevated viewpoints, he produces idealized, painterly landscapes drawn from the American West and Europe. Referencing nineteenth-century photography, his practice merges early photographic processes with contemporary technologies, including infrared, to revive the medium’s sense of experimentation and alchemy.
Brazilian photographer Claudia Andujar remembers her first encounter with the Yanomami, one of Brazil’s largest indigenous peoples, and describes how her series of photographs came about.
02. Listen
Sculptor and land artist Richard Long meets musician, composer, and producer Nitin Sawhney. Long is one of Britain’s most influential land artists, known for working with natural materials in rural landscapes, while Sawhney’s wide-ranging practice spans music, film, games, dance, and theatre. They chat about each other´s work, discpline and practise on Only Artists by BBC.
“I am aware of the presence of other people, past travelers. My walking patterns, the marks that I leave, are one more layer upon thousands of layers of crisscrosses, both human and animal.”
- Richard Long, Stones and Files: Richard Long in the Sahara
- Richard Long, Stones and Files: Richard Long in the Sahara
Richard Long, Dusty Boots Line, The Sahara, 1988
03. Read
In Walking, Henry David Thoreau treats movement through the land as a form of thought. To walk, for him, is not leisure but necessity, a way of attuning the body and mind to the rhythms of the world. Landscape becomes both companion and teacher, shaping perception through attention, solitude, and slowness. Thoreau’s reflections remind us that walking is an act of resistance against enclosure and abstraction, a means of reclaiming our relationship to the ground beneath our feet.
We go eastward to realize history and study the works of art and literature, retracing the steps of the race; we go westward as into the future, with a spirit of enterprise and adventure.
- Henry David Thoreau, ¨Walking¨
- Henry David Thoreau, ¨Walking¨
04. Photobooks
Exclusively curated by Josef Chladek, this photobook selection brings together works that linger on the land with patience and attention, inviting a slower way of looking. Fields, roads, edges appear in August Sander’s Rheinlandschaften, Lewis Baltz’s Park City, and Bryan Schutmaat’s Sons of the Living. Places shaped by use and time, by what remains and what has disappeared, make themselves felt throughout. The land is sometimes measured, sometimes intimate, always present, always returned to.
Photobooks description from https://josefchladek.com/
Josef Chladek (b. 1968, Vienna) holds a master’s degree in Physics from the Vienna University of Technology and lives and works in Vienna, where he builds an extensive library with a strong focus on photobooks. With over 25 years of experience across major Austrian media, he co-founded FC Chladek Drastil GmbH in 2013, developing digital and publishing projects for media houses, book platforms, and photography-related initiatives.
“'Rheinlandschaften' was the first book to be published by the newly founded Schirmer/Mosel-Verlag in 1975. The photographs in 'Rheinlandschaften' were taken between 1929 and 1946. After his first publication, 'Antlitz der Zeit', was confiscated by the Nazis, August SANDER turned to more politically innocuous landscape photography and created pictures of unusual atmospheric charm and high technical quality - 'portraits', as it were, of his immediate homeland, which are among the few remarkable pictorial creations in Germany in those years.
"There is a repetitive quality to Riebesehl’s compositions and although the beauty of the agricultural landscape is acknowledged, it is their function as a productive mechanism that is celebrated. As Riebesehl analyzes the modified landscapes of North Germany, his images seem to have a melancholic beauty, which further alludes to the changing function of these landscapes as they alter under progressive agricultural modernisation." (Claxton Projects)
"During 1978 and 1979 Lewis Baltz, one of America's foremost contemporary photographers, undertook to document the building of a rapidly growing ski resort and second-home development east of Salt Lake City in Utah's Wasatch Mountains. His concern was to record the construction of Park City as an example of the urbanization of the American West. When Baltz first saw the landscape around Park City, it appeared utterly chaotic, devastated by decades of abuse and neglect. Littered with fragments of iron, glass, wood, and wire -- the residue of mining wastes abandoned years earlier -- much of the land could support only meager vegetation. The scene suggested the aftermath of cataclysmic, purposeless violence. During the two and one half years that Baltz photographed Park City, the wasteland was covered with houses and commercial structures; ironically these only increased the sense of starkness and desolation." (From the publisher)
Joel Sternfeld travelled the country for around eight years with an 8x10 view camera and colour film, a sojourn that produced his first and best-known book, American Prospects... The particular quality brought by Sternfeld to the 8x10 colour-landscape aesthetic... is a clear sense of narrative... In American Prospects, each picture suggests an arcane drama being played out—an elephant stranded on a road in Oregon, or a pumpkin stall in Virginia behind which a house burns fiercely. These narrative hints are suggestive, sly, often ironic, frequently mysterious, making American Prospects less a series of photographs than a series of tales—unfinished, elliptical certainly—that add up to a cogent and persuasive view of America...
Parr/Badger, The Photobook (from Sternfeld´s website)
Parr/Badger, The Photobook (from Sternfeld´s website)
Paul Graham
¨Troubled Land deals with the small but insistent signs of political division embedded in the landscape of Northern Ireland. At the heart of the Irish conflict lays the land — who owns it, who controls it, whose history it expresses. Paul Graham’s quietly radical book keeps this material truth in mind as it uniquely combines landscape and conflict photography, seducing us with bucolic views in which telling details only gradually appear: painted kerbs, distant soldiers or helicopters, flags and graffiti, paint-splattered roads, each tacitly aligning that location to its Republican or Loyalist allegiance.¨
(from the reprint available from April 2022 at MACK)
"Tram stations, ski runs and panoramic terraces - the Alps are a playground for winter sports fans and enthusiastic mountain climbers: a populated Alpine leisure park. In his tableaus from close-up photos Walter Niedermayr documents the effects of Alpine tourism on the mountain world. But his pictures on the 'injuries' to the landscape are by no means pure photographic depictions of reality; he works in a subtle way with minimal changes of angle and viewpoint, and uses scarcely perceptible alterations to combine individual pictures into disturbing photo arrangements, achieving an intensity of seeing.¨(from the publisher)
The open American West is nearly gone. The New West is a photographic essay about what came to fill it—freeways, tract homes, low-rise business buildings and signs. In five sequences of pictures taken along the front wall of the Colorado Rocky Mountains, Robert Adams has documented a representative sampling of the whole suburban Southwest. These views have a double power. At first they shock; normally we try to forget the commercial squalor they depict. Slowly, however, they reveal aspects of the geography—the shape of the land itself, for example—that are beyond man’s harm. Adams has written that “all land, no matter what has happened to it, has over it a grace, an absolutely persistent beauty,” and his photographs show this. (from the Steidl reprint)
Joachim Brohm’s photographic series Ruhr documents the German Ruhr area during its industrial decline from the late 1970s to the mid-80s. With this work Brohm became one of the first to engage with the issues raised by American photography – the landscape photography of the nineteenth century and the topographical photography from 1970 onwards – and transport them into a European context. Ruhr is an integral link between USA and European photography and its special significance is revealed with this first complete monograph.
(from https://steidl.de/)
Bernard Fuchs follows his "Autos" monograph with this catalogue of roads and paths. These routes all lead somewhere, perhaps away from civilization, but, as Fuchs makes plain, are certainly civilizing entities themselves, the artificial medium by which nature is found. "In Bernhard Fuchs Roads and Paths, the vacant roads and byways of a rural region of Austria create lyrical metaphors for various aspects of life’s journey. Fuchs creates a sense of ambiguity at the moment of exposure. Whereas the viewer is not certain if they are looking at the future of the journey to come. Or in the past, of the journey taken." - Douglas Stockdale for The PhotoBook
(from https://www.setantabooks.com/)
(from https://www.setantabooks.com/)
A Road Divided expresses that unconventional ‘natural’ beauty, particular to Hido’s work: the open road on a rainy day, seductive in its promise of freedom, but reigned in by fences and traffic signs. Order and containment despite a perceived desire for breaking out. Persistent in Hido’s work is the idea of coming back (to an emotion, if not a place) despite leaving, but this time with the weight of experience, maybe even a sort of resignation to the cyclical nature of the mind.
In his photographic account Pastoral, Alexander Gronsky portrays the outskirts of Moscow: the places where humanity takes refuge to find solace far from the cities, colliding with urban expansion and frailty of nature. The space explored lives “in between”, suspended in the nothingness of the unknown and what stands “on the other side”.
"Carrying out this photograph project is because of the inspiration after reading the novel River of the North written by Zhang Chengzhi. Attracted by the powerful words in this novel, I decided to take a walk along the Yellow River to experience and feel the father-like broad and wide brought from this river, so that I could find the root of my soul .while along the way, the river from my mind was inundated by the stream of reality. The river, which once was full of legends, had gone and disappeared. That is kind of my profound pessimism. Nevertheless, as a vast country with a long history, its future is always bright. There is a descent in the matrix; there is her own nutrition to feed her babies; there is the power of creation to cultivate them strongly. The weak moaning finally will be drowned by the shout for joy. From this point of view, it seems, all shall be optimistic."
I have been photographing these cars as they are parked. In front of a house, in a driveway, in a parking lot, in a garage, alongside a road, in a courtyard, in a street. In their natural habitat. With these photographs, I want to show how we live, how our surroundings look. I wish to portray the everyday landscape. A photographic documentation of the landscape we inhabit. (Helge Skodvin)
In his latest book, Brandenburg, Andreas Gehrke composes a considered portrait of the sparsely populated state that encircles Berlin. A region that has been described as bleak, austere and unforgiving, Gehrke’s Brandenburg is marked by moments of incongruity. Drawn to the undefined, the seemingly desolate, he depicts places characterised by transition, absence and indeterminacy.
"After almost thirty years I now have this work about the place where I grew up in front of me again. As I look at the photographs I took back then, I feel a sense of wonder tinged with a little sentimentality but also delight. I have never broken off my connection with this city and region, and each time I have visited since then I have noticed astonishing changes and realised that everything, however ordinary, is subject to a process of permanent change. I use my photographs to assure myself that change has indeed taken place and to preserve my memories." (Laurenz Berges in the foreword)
Agnieszka Sosnowska
Agnieszka Sosnowska’s debut monograph, För, is an intimate portrait of the artist’s life and community in a remote corner of East Iceland. Sosnowska was born in Poland and raised in Boston. Coming of age between two countries and disparate cultural identities, she felt neither fully Polish nor American during her youth. It wasn't until adulthood that she moved to Iceland and found the place where she truly belongs. Here, Sosnowska lives a quiet life, residing on a farm with her husband and working as a teacher in a rural k-12 school. In this tight knit world, she uses a large format view camera to photograph the land and people with tenderness and unwavering commitment. Set amidst the harsh elements and rugged beauty of the Nordic landscape, För is a book of gratitude and love – a story about finding home and a chosen family that carry through the seasons of life.
Bryan Schutmaat
Sons of the Living is a photobook about the land and people along the highways of America’s deserts. Photographed over the course of a decade in the American West’s arid and sweeping terrain, this work depicts a human capacity for endurance. Schutmaat offers an updated view of the “open road” that addresses a new era of uncertainty and anxiety. Amidst a backdrop of environmental decline, economic dispossession, and societal neglect, Sons of the Living draws attention to trouble on the road ahead and searches for our hope to withstand it.
05. From the Community
We first came across Francesco Neri’s work on Instagram through a feature by David Campany, where a quiet black and white photograph from Wooden Tool Shed caught our attention and stayed with us. Born in 1982 in Faenza, Italy, Neri lives and works in the same region that has become central to his photographic practice, focusing on rural architecture, working landscapes, and the people who inhabit them. His long term approach to place, often using a large format camera, allows time, continuity, and subtle change to surface within the images. Wooden Tool Shed, published by Imagebeeld Edition with a text by David Campany, reflects this sustained engagement with material, labor, and memory. We later reached out to invite him into our Community section, and his generous and prompt response made it possible to share this work just before the festive season in 2025.
Image credit: Francesco Neri, Wooden Tool Shed, 2024
Courtesy of Large Glass Gallery.
Whether I photograph a person or a landscape, the highest ambition is, to paraphrase Oliver Sacks, to let light in without it being processed by the bureaucracy of my brain. In retrospect, it is the only way for me to understand what the photograph is showing me.
- Francesco Neri
- Francesco Neri
Boncellino marks Francesco Neri’s first exhibition in London and the initial presentation of a body of work developed over two years in the small hamlet of Boncellino, near his hometown of Faenza in Emilia Romagna. Photographed close to home, the series unfolds through repeated returns to the same people and buildings, allowing time to quietly enter the frame. As Neri revisits these places, both photographer and subjects age together, and the work becomes a record not only of rural life, but of continuity and change. Shown at Large Glass Gallery between January and March 2024, with an accompanying text by Kate Bush, Boncellino will be published as a book at a later date.
Image credit: Francesco Neri, Boncellino, 2022/2025
Courtesy of Large Glass Gallery.