Nature, Toni Hafkenscheid tells us, almost always comes across as artificial. It is as if it has been transplanted directly from the model railway he has as a child. Hafkenscheid associates the North American landscape with the trees of cotton wool and cardboard mountains through which his trains used to run. In CONFABULATION he tries to give the real the appearance of artificiality. For that he uses  tilt-shift lenses, which, because he uses them the ‘wrong way around’, offer him the possibility of having only a small slice of the landscape in sharp focus, leaving the rest of the image fuzzy.

In 2010 Yasser Aggour began collecting photographs of  hunting trophies and the proudly smiling hunters posing with their dead prey. The images had a strange and morbid allure. Rather than presenting them as objets trouvés, Aggour decided to manipulate them digitally, stripping out the hunters. The images of the bodies of the animals,  isolated and contorted, are simultaneously poignant and brutal, a cross between landscape photography, found art, and a memento mori.

During a controlled prairie fire, Jane Fulton Alt observes, there comes a moment when life and death are not competing forces, but parts of one all-embracing process. The start of her long-term project THE BURN coincided with the diagnosis and treatment of her sister’s cervical cancer. The parallels are evident: just as the prairie fire kills unwanted vegetation to give other plants a chance to grow,  chemotherapy kills unwanted cells to create room for healthy ones. This cycle was the inspiration for THE BURN.

Two media come together in GONG: the series comprises a range of painted entities that are placed in photographed landscapes. The mythic figures call up associations with a world after a nuclear war, or with an extreme degree of evolution in which mankind has ceased to play a role. Apostolidou describes the beings, painted in a naive style, as forlorn, out of their element and melancholy. They are the visualization of the forgotten animal side of man.

The Netherlands has many ‘man-made’ hills which can be used for recreation by skiers, mountain bikers, golfers and hikers. Korrie Besems recorded them. With one exception – SnowWorld, which arose on the spoils heap of a former coal mine – these hills conceal former refuse tips, which now provide the opportunity to develop activities that would otherwise not be obvious possibilities in the flat Netherlands.

The series ALBEDO ZONE is comprised of black and white photographs of glacial ice and glacier water. They were made in Alaska, consistent with a scientific system that calculates the degree of reflection of solar energy from the terrain, a technique that is important to the study of climate change. This reflective capacity is termed ‘albedo’. Ice reflects warmth, whereas water absorbes it, a mechanism that strengthens warming effects. Bezzubov made silver gelatine prints of his photos, which gives the original prints a delicate beauty, which can not be duplicated in reproduction.

In a commission for Manchester’s Piccadilly railway station Justine Blau created a series of nine, at first glance wild and exotic landscapes in which man plays no role. On further examination one discovers that these imaginary worlds are assembled  from photos that Blau found on the internet. She took her inspiration from the drawings and paintings that were made to acquaint the home front with the discoveries of explorers, from Columbus to Captain Cook with their new worlds, images which were at one and the same time scientific evidence, eye-witnesses’ accounts, and the source of myths.

The Dutch photographer Paul Bogaers can regularly be found at flea markets and second-hand stores. A number of years back he became intrigued by a kind of picture post card which depicts a landscape that is reflected in water. Turn the image by 90 degrees, and it becomes an abstract blot, which is reminiscent of the ink blots in the Rorschach test, which for decades was a regular element in psychological screening. Although Rorschach’s theories are outdated, the instinctive reactions to these images does tell us something about the psychology of perception. We can not look without assigning meaning, Bogaers says. The inner thoughts are exposed by the external world.

How do we experience time and space? Kim Boske records the landscape from different vantage points and at different moments. By combining these, layer over layer, into one image she tries to establish the essential quality of the changing reality; a quality that is lost in a simple, frozen image. In this way she investigates how our own movement through time and space influences our perspective on the world.

SACRED FORESTS contains a series of portraits of sacred woodlands all around the world. As a result of their sacred status they also are rare bastions of biodiversity. They are places where scientists can still find the kingdom of nature intact, and are in shrill contrast to the polluted and overwhelmingly complex world in which we live.

In the West man has turned his back on nature, say Juan Calle. But that is different in Colombia. There the struggle for land is the basis for an unceasing cycle of violence between the FARC guerrillas, paramilitaries, multinationals and the government, with defenceless citizens, farmers and minorities caught in the middle. In his compositions Calle transforms the landscape of Colombia into a metaphor for a history of conflict, exploitation and discrimination.

In our fast-changing world we seldom come in contact with real nature. Nature has become a museum piece, animals are exhibited, fenced in and protected by laws. In her images Patricia van de Camp reminds us of the lost intimacy between man and nature. Mankind longs to return to a symbiotic relationship with nature, but the bitter reality is that we are more likely to come into contact with a dead animal than a living one.

What will the world be like when synthetic organisms, created by man, adapt to the natural environment? Alison Carey photographed dioramas with creatures made from flesh-like material, creating an image of the world after man. It is a science fiction landscape that is less unreal than it seems. The progress of tissue engineering will make it possible in the future for us to create entities that can exist outside the controlled environment of the laboratory.

The Spanish photographer Jon Cazenave was born in the Basque country, a region with a strong thirst for autonomy. The Basque country is set off from the rest of Spain by mountains, permitting the growth of a vital language and culture. In its landscape, Cazenave says, nature blends with history and legend. The result is a mythic, magical land – the subject of Cazenave’s photography. By humanizing trees and animals, he creates a symbolic landscape that lays bare the soul of the Basques.

An herbarium, a collection of different species of plants and flowers, is a scientific manner of observing, categorizing and cataloguing nature. In ERBARIO Margherita Cesaretti investigates the fragile beauty of flowers. The series is the outcome of various techniques, ranging from glass negatives to digital photography. For Cesaretti, these plants, once again awakened to life, are a metaphor for the way that man seeks ways to survive in all circumstances.

Creation and destruction become one in the work of Christopher Colville. The artist explodes small amounts of gunpowder on silver gelatine photo paper. Although the explosions are controlled by placing objects on the photo paper, the result is always a brilliant accident. The images evoke associations with processes that take place in deep space, where creation and destruction are equally closely connected with each other.

The digital flower arrangements of Anita Cruz-Eberhard are inspired by ikebana, the traditional Japanese art of arranging flowers. The photographer assembles her bouquets from the data bases of botanical departments at various universities – they exist thus only in digital and printed form. In this sense DIGITAL IKEBANAS is an investigation of the relation between the natural and the artificial, between reality and art, and between reality and perception. The work underscores the illusory quality of photography and demonstrates the inability of people to doubt what they see: seeing is believing.

In COME WITH ME Ellie Davies investigates the relation between landscapes and the artist, and the way in which the landscape helps form identity. In addition, the series underscores that our perception of nature is coloured by our cultural baggage. Davies photographed paths of artificial materials meandering through the woods, paths which enable her to be a part of nature, and which shape nature. Her work is a new approach to the role that art has traditionally had in the attribution of meaning to nature, and the creation of myths.

Just as pilgrims flock together at holy places, where they meet one another and forge bonds, the festival calender brings together large groups of young people. During festivals, Venetia Dearden says, young people find their ‘tribe’ or ‘community’. EIGHT DAYS is the result of a personal journey that the photographer undertook in 2010 with a group of her friends, during a road trip through California and Nevada. They entered an ‘alternative reality, far from the well-ordered everyday world’.

Dornith Doherty has been working together with prominent botanists from the seed banks of the American Department of Agriculture and the Royal Botanic Gardens in Kew, England, since 2008. In a time of climate change and declining biodiversity, these banks play an important role in guaranteeing genetic diversity. Doherty uses the institutions’ x-ray equipment to record seed and tissue samples. She makes collages with the images she acquires, which are an ode to the power of nature and pose poetic questions about the essence of life and time.

How do you photograph those moments which, although not dramatic or spectacular and moving, are nonetheless at the heart of our enjoyment of life? Bela Doka found the answer in and around the rural home of his girlfriend’s family. This is a world of sunny luncheon tables, a reinvigorating swim in the river, wandering through open fields, and activities that are entirely unconnected with deadlines and production schedules.

With COLORFIELD Claire Dorn pays homage to the work of the painter Mark Rothko (1903-1970), one of the leading figures in abstract expressionism. The variant that Rothko practised is known as  ‘color field painting’, for the large fields of flat, solid colour that it uses to be able to place maximum emphasis on the colour itself. For Rothko the color field was a means of rendering complex concepts in as simple a way as possible. In a similar way, Dorn is seeking a powerful, abstract photography.

Thanks to the industrialization during the Soviet era and contamination from its oil industry, Azerbaijan has a number of the most seriously polluted sites in the world. On the Apsheron peninsula, which projects out into the Caspian Sea, the ground exudes a toxic vapour, while oil seeping to the surface makes the soil infertile. Rena Effendi conceived LIQUID LAND together with her father, a dissident entomologist who was able to collect 90,000 butterflies from the Soviet Union. Images of the colourful but dead creatures interact powerfully with those of Apsheron’s polluted soil.

David Farrell (Ireland, 1961) was trained as a chemist, but is presently a photographer and photography instructor. He received the 2004 European Publishers Award for Photography for his book Innocent Landscapes. He took part in the European Eyes on Japan project and produced the multimedia film Crow together with the composer Benjamin Dwyer. Since 2009 he has once again been following the search for the missing from the Northern Irish conflict, in the places that he had previously recorded in Innocent Landscapes.

Our self-chosen separation from nature is one of the central problems for mankind, Michael Flomen argues. We need contact with nature, and lose an essential part of ourselves when we avoid that contact. Flomen photographs a  nature that we do not perceive directly, although we know it exists. He work outdoors, where insects and the elements, but also electromagnetic fields and other natural phenomena affect his photosensitive material directly. His images, he explains, are intended to appeal to memories that are deeply anchored in our genes.

Doug Fogelson (United States, 1970) took his BA in Fine Arts at the School of the Art Institute in Chicago. He has been active as a photographer and artist since 1996, and in 2001 was included in their ‘30 Under Thirty’ list of the most promising young photographers by the American photo magazine Photo District News. He is the founder and director of Front Forty Press, a publisher that specializes in artistic books.

Narcissus, a figure from Greek mythology, saw his own reflection in the water, and fell in love with himself. During an exploration of the Norwegian landscape Stuart Franklin noted that he was seeking visual points of reference. His mind descried the shapes of eyes, trolls and icons in tree bark, clumps of grass and water features. They were reflections of his own mind, which provided him with a gateway to reveal an unfamiliar landscape.

For teenage girls the years of adolescence are a complex and sensitive period in which they learn to see themselves in the context of society and wrestle with their identity. It is a time of psychological and  physical change. Julia Fullerton-Batten photographed teenage girls in a landscape setting that was strange to them, and asked them to pose. The result is a measure of the discomfort that is inseparably linked with this phase of life.

Peter Funch’s photographs have a surrealistic quality. In the three-part work TRIPTYCHS we see a moment – but is it in fact one moment? Were these images manipulated and put together afterwards? Funch himself offers the viewer noting more to go on than a quote from the Japanese writer Haruki Murakami: ‘That’s what the world is, after all: an endless battle of contrasting memories.’

Fearing an invasion of his country, under his regime the Albanian Communist leader Enver Hoxha had about 750,000 bunkers built. Strangely enough, the effect was an increasing sense of insecurity among the population. Twenty years after the fall of Communism only outsiders still have an eye for the relics of the paranoid past. The way in which the bunkers are disappearing, or being repurposed for entirely new uses, affords an insight into the transformation process in the poorest country in Europe.

For UN-PLUGGED 2.0 Henrik Isaksson Garnell constructed creatures from natural and man-made elements. He combined bones, teeth, plants and other organic materials with iron wire, lamps, and other human ephemera. Once they were completed the artist photographed them in large format, against a black background. The surrealistic result appears to have arisen in the mind of someone from another planet.

Born and raised in Moldavia, Andrej Glusgold (Soviet Union, 1968) emigrated to West Germany in 1981, where he studied at the Art Academy in Bremen in the 1990s. His work has appeared in various, primarily French and German magazines, and has been seen at the Rencontres Photographiques d’Arles and other festivals. Presently he is professor of photography at the University of Applied Arts in Berlin.

ONE MONTH consists of photographs of the night sky over the Canadian city of Banff. Thanks to the long exposure time we see not only the tracks of the stars – as streaks of light – but also the interference caused by clouds crossing the sky and air pollution. The series consists of random compositions, which become a metaphor for greater natural forces that refuse to submit to our will for order. In these images Harper makes things palpable which remain elusive to the naked eye. In SUN/MOON she mines the impact cameras and optics have on our understanding: we can not look at the sun directly, or know the details of the moon's surface, without a mediating instrument.

Every summer urban children, satiated with pre-programmed computer games, retreat into nature to build castles and palaces of branches and brushwood. Under the canopy of leaves they indulge in stories that go far enough to be exciting, but not so far that the adult world gets worried. After a time they leave these huts behind, small monuments to the nostalgic, wild days of childhood.

From its earliest days the West of the United States has been a dream that had to be sold. In his series VACATION John Brinton Hogan deals with the ways in which art and media have shaped the myth of the West. He shows us that everywhere there are places where vast vistas can be experienced, just as they were before the arrival of man. But catch sight of the infrastructure that now intrudes on them, and the illusion is shattered.

For many people, only part of the physical reality of the world of plants is directly visible. In addition to the forms that we can see with the unaided eye, plants are surrounded by an invisible electromagnetic field. Paul den Hollander brings the form and field together, creating a totally new experience of reality as he does. But more: with THE LUMINOUS GARDEN he builds a bridge between art and science.

In SOFT HORIZONS, made in the highlands of Bolivia, Scarlett Hooft Graafland makes interventions in the landscape with the intention of abstracting or emphasizing elements in that landscape. The photos, made over a period of eight years, balance on the borders of photography, land art and performance art, and regularly refer to art history.

INERCIA is about the way in which reality is constructed by audiovisual media. In a time span of four minutes it plays games with the rhythm and narrative conventions of audiovisual renderings of  ‘reality’. Just as the blink of an eye disrupts the continuity of time and space, a frame isolates and freezes a precise moment and a precise place. The sum total of these moments forms the representation of this putative reality, as contained in ‘the document’.

The phrase ‘parts per million’ refers to the proportion of one element to the whole of the compound of which it is part. Isenrath made the series with the same title in August, 2010, several months after an explosion on the Deepwater Horizon oil platform in the Gulf of Mexico spewed hundreds of thousands of barrels of oil into the water. Because access to the heavily polluted coastal areas of Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama and Florida was restricted, Isenrath decided to photograph the beautiful beaches which were still accessible. The barely visible clean-up crews and their materials disrupt the idyll.

The seed for THE APOLLO PROPHECIES was planted during a period at Toni Morrison’s Atelier Program at Princeton University. It resulted, years later, in a uninterrupted panoramic black and white photo half a metre high and thirty metres long. On it we see astronauts from the 1960s, who once on the moon discover an expedition from the early 20th century which was supposed to have been lost. Kahn and Selesnick made use of miniatures and real actors, who come together in a story with different episodes, composed with a narrative technique reminiscent of religious frescos.

There are claims that in 1947 a space craft with three dead extraterrestrials on board crashed near the American town of Roswell, New Mexico – a claim shrouded in mystery and source of many conspiracy theories. When Gábor Kerekes discovered the computer programme USA Photo Maps, from which it is possible to download photographic quality satellite images, he wanted to see Roswell as it looks from space. Due to a mistake in the coordinates he missed his target by some hundreds of metres... and saw geometric forms that are intended to get information across to lay persons. He printed them out and photographed the prints in large format, so that the digital image again became analogue.

The work of the photographer Sana Khan always has a dreamy quality. In her TREE SERIES we see people in stylized landscapes whose central feature are trees. There is always the suggestion of  loneliness and inadequacy. In that sense the images are more psychological portraits, than real situations.

With his UNTITLED series Samnang Khvay fixes attention on a development that is having a deep influence on the urban planning of the Cambodian capital, Phnom Penh and the lives of thousands of poor families: the privatization and filling of public lakes for the benefit of developers. Khvay distances himself from the traditional practice of documentary photography by photographing himself while he pours a bucket of sand over himself, a metaphor that is open to various interpretations.

The impressive landscape of the American Midwest was the backdrop for genocide during the second half of the 19th century. Countless Native American tribes were driven from their land, exterminated or confined to reservations by a duplicitous federal government. Kalpesh Lathigra photographed the people and landscapes of the Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota, since 1876 home to the Oglala-Lakota Sioux. It is a place with massive problems: high unemployment, drug and alcohol abuse, obesity, domestic violence and a gang culture. But its people also maintain a proud culture.

The ATLAS OF HEAVENS series is an exercise in pseudo-cartography. Anyone looking at nature will regularly recognize structures that call up associations with maps and alien worlds. Peeter Laurits found them in the toadstools with which he was surrounded when he moved to a small hut in the woods of southern Estonia. He photographed them so that they create the illusion of colourful and bizarre planets. In doing so he has not only produced portraits of magic mushrooms, but also accounts of  mental trips that are sometimes hallucinatory and sometimes meditative in nature.

The way in which her forebears recorded the Canadian landscape has been definitive for how Aislinn Leggett sees nature in her country. Using landscape photography from the beginning of the 20th century, as well as photos from her own family archive, Leggett composed scenes that give her the opportunity to resurrect the past within the landscape. ENTER THE GREAT WIDE OPEN lays bare elements of the Canadian identity that are still of importance a hundred years later.

The moon influences life on earth in many ways: through the tides, but also through the way in which this heavenly body – which always turns its same face to us – stimulates our fantasies. Sergey Lutsenko evokes his own ideal image of a lunar colony. It is not based on a metropolis, but on a world that feels familiar, like a small town: traffic signs, sports fields, a kitchen garden. There are no people,just objects. In that sense, Lutsenko says, it is also a model for lunar land art.

The Japanese photographer Hiroyuki Masuyama travelled through Europe in the footsteps of the 19th century painters Caspar David Friedrich (1774-1840) and J.M.W. Turner (1775-1851), who recorded their travels in romantic and dramatic paintings, respectively. Masuyama made reproductions of these paintings, assembled from thousands of photos that he took in the places that the painters had set down on canvas 160 years before. These photo montages are lit from the inside, giving these iconic artworks a whole new, contemporary dimension.

Any time that Paula McCartney walks in the woods she has an eye for the birds. But she never tried to capture them with her camera: the birds were too far away and too flighty in their movements to arrive at a satisfactory composition. She solved that problem in BIRD WATCHING by placing handmade songbirds in the landscape and photographing these ‘upgraded’ landscapes. The birds are like jewels that enrich the landscape, even as the landscape gives added value to the birds.

The intention of a sniper is to remain unseen. Within the framework of his research into the nature of terror and the mechanisms that we employ to arouse feelings of anxiety and uncertainty, Simon Menner (with the assistance of the German army) photographed snipers hiding in the landscape. Look carefully and you will see them – their weapons aimed at the camera – and thus at you.

The future perfect tense is used to describe events that have not yet occurred, but may confidently be expected to happen. In FUTURE PERFECT we see three locations where future ways of life and the choices that people will have to make are being anticipated. One is a piece of desert near Las Vegas where experiments with sustainable living are taking place, the second the artificial ecosystem Biosphere 2 at Oracle, Arizona and the third the geothermal landscapes in Island. From the accumulated images Natal composed several chapters. Starting in the year 2040, she goes back to 2010. Noorderlicht shows the 2040 chapter.

In January, 2009, Michael Najjar stood on the top of Aconcagua, the highest mountain in the world outside of Asia. The photographic material that he assembled there formed the basis for a series on the fluctuations in financial markets. Najjar visualized the indexes of the world’s most important stock exchanges and made virtual data tangible by giving it the form of serrated mountain tops. The work is a metaphor for the thin line that separates the real and the virtual, a line which in the Exchanges – where virtual money has become more important than the goods and firms that it is supposed to represent – has become blurred perhaps more than anywhere else.

After her studio was completely destroyed by a storm, Wawi Navarroza developed a strong urge to photograph volcanos. She ended up in Hawaii, where she was able to confront the harshest, most destructive forces in wild nature. Is she planning to hoist the white flag in surrender, or is she going to attempt to tame these formidable powers with a white sheet? And what sort of wilderness is it, if it can be reduced to the limited scale of a photo?

When Catherine Nelson began photographing, the feeling crept over her that the medium fell short of being able to get across her inner experience of the world around her. Thanks to her training as a painter and years of experience in the film industry, where she had worked with the most advanced digital effects, she was able to find new ways. From thousands of photos of a specific place she assembles floating, transcendent and otherworldly appearing landscapes.

Every day disturbing new reports about the changing climate arrive through the media. Glaciers are melting, deserts spreading, water shortages lead to political conflicts. The result, Loan Nguyen tells us, is a constant state of agitation and anxiety. Her own anxiety was the starting point for a series in which she attributed divine powers to herself, to influence the world for the better. What she shows us is of course impossible, but yet a striking and poetic translation of the feeling that came over her thanks to our incapacity to fundamentally deal climate problems.

How much information – abstract or visual – can you gather about a subject from one point of view? That question was the point of departure for a series of photos of El Teide, the largest volcano on the island of Tenerife. Meike Nixdorf recorded the volcano from different angles, so that each image reveals new aspects of the same object. On the one hand, these images are like the pieces of a puzzle which form one whole; on the other, each image is autonomous.

A recurrent theme in Australian films, literature, art and history is the child who disappears into the bush. In contrast to European fairy tales, in which the wilderness can also be a refuge, and a place of self-discovery and transformation, the Australian bush is only a place of curse and doom. HAUNTED COUNTRY consists of images that are staged at places where children of colonists once disappeared. Both literally and metaphorically they touch on the vulnerability of children and the ambivalent relation Australians have with their merciless landscape.

With regularity the serene landscape of Cambodia betrays its bloody history. One example of that are what are called ‘bomb ponds’, water features that have formed in the craters that were created by the illegal American bombardment during the Vietnam War. Rattana Vandy’s experience of the landscape has been coloured by it. The sound of the violence, and with it of Cambodia history, has died away, but in that silence Vandy hears it yet. That makes it difficult to enjoy the real sounds of nature.

While the Arab Spring dominated the media and conversations on the street, in the Moroccan city of Tangier Lola Reboud was photographing young people who gathered in parks, gardens and on the outskirts of the city during Ramadan. From these various places she created one utopian Garden of Eden. All the encounters she recorded were as transitory as the season in which they took place, and given the political situation, paradoxical in their gentleness. Reboud derived the title of the series from the tables that give the positions of astronomical objects in the sky. These tables sugest constant movements, just like the lives of these young people change constantly.

In the 1960s Singapore used the earth from its modest hills for landfill projects in the sea. Today this mini-state is almost flat, and must buy sand from Indonesia and Malaysia if it is to expand its area. Whenever a landfill project begins, widespread desert-like landscapes appear on the edges of Singapore, replacing now-vanished beaches. On weekends residents go out to the new coast lines, searching for the beaches they once knew. AS WE WALKED ON WATER is part of the Land Archive, a repository for found and historical images.

With SOLSTICE the photographer Misha de Ridder seeks nothing less than to record the sublimity of nature. For him it is not a matter of reducing nature at a saccharine picture post card, but rather of laying bare its various emotional dimensions, from the meditative to the sinister. In DUNE De Ridder sought echoes of the past in the landscape of today, in this case in the Kennemer Dunes of North Holland. With his work De Ridder tries to make something which is pre-eminently individual, namely the experience of a landscape, accessible for viewers.

Just as in his project MOTHERLAND, in WE ENGLISH Simon Roberts investigates themes like identity and memory. He travelled around through his native land in a camper, photographing scenes of his countrymen engaged in recreational activities, presented in large format. Roberts shows us a people who have a close bond with their local surroundings and the land. Anyone wanting to know what it means to be ‘English’ only has to look at the commonplace and the banal in English leisure activities.

The Latin word limen means ‘boundary’ or ‘threshold’. We encounter the liminal everywhere in our lives. In LIMINAL POINTS Nick Rochowski, mindful of Plato, demolishes a boundary between then and now, between reality and fantasy. He returned to Penn Wood, Buckinghamshire, to the vivid  fantasies of his childhood, in a journey out of the ordinary. The series was inspired by films from the late 1970s and early 1990s, and the work of the magic realist writer J.G. Ballard and manga artist and writer Katsuhiro Otomo, among others. For LIMINAL POINTS Rochowski worked together with the illustrator Greg Haynes and music producer Deepsea.

In BAUMSCHULE Gerco de Ruijter plays with the sharply defined agricultural landscapes of tree farms. Small deviations stand out in the rigid rhythms of the rows of trees – and it is precisely these deviations which assure that we are again aware of nature. ALMOST NATURE was done in an evergreen nursery in Boskoop, South Holland. Each plant there is a clone, so that each colour represents a different original source. They are, De Ruijter observes, the equivalent of the photographic pixel.

The goddess Pachamama – a name that literally translated means ‘Mother Earth’ – plays a central role in the religion of many native peoples in South America. Their traditions also emphasize the direct relation between man and nature. This connects with the scientific idea that all organisms and the non-organic environment (water, rocks, soil) are part of one complex, integrated system. From this follows the idea that anyone who harms nature is committing a form of self-mutilation. Rytz travelled into the Colombian Amazon rain forest to photograph people who have not yet repudiated Pachamama.

The photos in the series A HISTORY OF THE FUTURE were shot at places where scientists are researching climate change and seeking ways to minimize its effects or help us adapt to them. The serenity of these places contrasts radically with the violent consequences that climate change has. Here it is not the individual image that tells the story, but the whole archive of images, in the larger context of the discourse on climate change. It is for this reason that Sayler and Morris regularly combine the images with objects, research data and video installations.

Anyone following Little Red Riding Hood’s footsteps into the deepest, darkest parts of the forest enters the theatre of the imagination. Near and far, dark and light, and the colour spectrum all blur, so that we end up in a transcendent state, in a dream world and the subconscious. Gregor Schuster invites us to become creatures in that forest.

In Japan 70 percent of the land is covered by mountains and forests. That possibly explains the intimate bond that he has with the landscape, Takeshi Shikama notes. The photographer has the sense that the woods are calling him in a telepathic manner – a feeling that he never had during the decades that he lived in the megalopolis of Tokyo. His work reflects this new and mysterious relation.

Peter Solness specializes in night photography. By photographing in the dark, with long exposure times, each landscape becomes a painting of light, in which the sparse natural light becomes mixed with the light of street lamps. The work is an ensemble of the immediacy of photography and the weighed sensibility of painting.

Sfumato, Italian for ‘smoky’, is a technique in painting in which the contours of objects are blurred. With the use of a 3D programme and mathematical noise algorithms Edi Szekely created idyllic, apparently virgin landscapes. But by applying a sfumato technique to parts of the image, the impression of mystery is evoked. It is reminiscent of the way in which we usually think about  landscape: as something that is largely shaped by interventions on the part of man.

Each landscape has a character of its own, formed by an interplay of shapes, textures, sounds, odours and light. It is that character that makes it possible for us to feel a deep connection with nature. The artist duo TAXI were travelling with Gora, a little boy from the city, and by accident ended up in an isolated landscape on the edge of a city. It was an entirely different landscape than Gora was used to. The emotions that he felt in that place at that moment are the subject of BEING THERE & THEN.

In her work Agnes Thor creates worlds that fall into the twilight zone between reality and fiction. This is because she photographs both actual, and small, staged events. Her Nathalie: Southwood Sequence is a portrait of a utopia, as described in Celtic myths. Aurora Borealis is inspired by Norse myths, and takes place in a world where trees, stones or mist can suddenly be transformed into mythic beings. UNTITLED presents a selection from these series, which are indirect portraits of Thor herself.

Sfumato, Italian for ‘smoky’, is a technique in painting in which the contours of objects are blurred. With the use of a 3D programme and mathematical noise algorithms Edi Szekely created idyllic, apparently virgin landscapes. But by applying a sfumato technique to parts of the image, the impression of mystery is evoked. It is reminiscent of the way in which we usually think about  landscape: as something that is largely shaped by interventions on the part of man.

With a few exceptions, almost all recreational interventions in the landscape date from after the Second World War. Notable examples are the European ski resorts like Flaine and Avoriaz, which were designed in the 1960s and built according to a clear plan. Other ski resorts were more Wild West operations, as the proliferation of chalet-like buildings testified. In THE SKIABLE LANDSCAPE Goos van der Veen shows us the radically reshaped mountain landscape and its users.

During the Industrial Revolution German romantic painters – Caspar David Friedrich in the lead – combined elements from different landscapes to their heart’s content in order to expose the sublime and approach ‘true feeling’. A mass of rocks from Rügen could therefore end up next to a tree from Dresden. In this series Tessa Verder puts trees from paintings into her photographed landscapes. She too no longer shuns combinations, now that man once again appears to be in search of the restoration of contact with nature.

We live in a time of massive change, in which the social and economic structures created by man appear to be inadequate. The resulting disorientation forces us to reconsider our lives. Nature, if it is not the answer, can at least be a refuge where people can set up new ways of living, or simply draw the inspiration necessary for their reflection. In BIOPHILIA Marco Vernaschi investigates our apparently instinctive urge to restore our bond with nature, based on a series of personal experiences.

Céret, a village in the French Pyrenees, was once popular with painters like Picasso, Matisse and Braque. During his stay there Benoît Vollmer turned his back on both the realistic and the consciously disorienting traditions in landscape photography. In their place, he sought refuge in the abstractions of early 20th century painting. He looked for the edges of the cultivated plots, and undertook an attempt to capture an element in his images which is omnipresent, but impossible to grasp: the unceasing wind of the Pyrenees.

Inspired by the 1960s, when, following the lead of Color Field painters like Morris Louis and Frank Stella, Robert Walker was producing geometric paintings, in recent years he has been photographing flowers with a comparable feeling for abstraction. But don’t be fooled, he warns, this is not an attempt to give photography the illusion of painting. It is an attempt to break free of photography’s objective and recording function, to be able to take a fresh look at an often clichéd subject.

With the aid of digital techniques, topography, cartography and 3D software Marcel Wesdorp makes animated films and prints of digitally designed landscapes. They are the outcome of a lengthy process of calculation, and convey the sense of landscape by means of undulating hills. Because of the absence of people, animals or plants, but also because the green tints are converted into grey tones, we can imagine ourselves on the tundra or steppes – landscapes that accentuate the insignificance of man.

Inspired by the landscape and the light, in REAL LANDSCAPES Thomas Wrede created new worlds in model size. He places toy cars and plastic trees in natural surroundings and photographs them from just above ground level with a large format analogue camera. As a result, the smallest gestures become  grand and compelling: a replica of a grandiose idyll or a terrible disaster.

Strip away the backgrounds in zoos and amusement parks of people and animals, and what is left are artificial reconstructions of wild nature. Just as a photograph is a memory of a moment, this fake nature is only a memory of real nature, which we normally know only from photographs and films. By recording these backdrops Karin Borghouts creates a memory of a memory. In doing so, she poses questions about the nature of photography and our ideal images of nature.    

The way in which we see the landscape is to a great extent determined by the words that we use to describe it and the aesthetic values that we project on it. Ignasi Cunill sees the landscape not only as a physical fact, but also as a mirror of our soul. In photos of landscape elements in an urban environment, where our ideas about nature and culture encounter each other, he plays with the delicate balance between words, mental images and photography. In the process he lays bare our ideas about what is natural and what is man-made.

Photography is not so much a matter of recording reality, but rather creates a narrative framework in which interaction and projection play a large role. We live in a world of images, Fichou says, but these images precede a supposed reality that we construct in our mind. For his series MIRADORS Fichou had trees along the streets of Mexico City trimmed by nurserymen, after which he asked people to climb into the trees to pose for the photos. Reality, or not?

The photographer Eric Jan van de Geer is interested in commonplace things that usually escape our notice. In PRIVATE LANDSCAPE II he recorded front gardens during the night hours. The photos are shot on landscape format Polaroid film. This was not from nostalgic considerations, but for the restrictions that the material brings with it, which force the artist to make hard choices.

Inspired by 19th century occult photography, the symbolism of 17th century Dutch still-lifes, and the obsessive character of botanical catalogues, Kate Greene photographs carefully constructed natural tableaux and the way that landscapes change under the influence of light and time. She tries to build a bridge between the scientific perception of the physical world and the way in which people experience that world.

The garden is a metaphor for the ways in which people have freed themselves from the wilderness and began shaping the world around them according to their own insights. With his aerial photos of gardens – mathematical and controlled at a macro level, but no less chaotic at the level of the foliage – Jonathan Groeneweg touches on long-running discussions about the landscape and urban development. Our changing perception of nature has direct influence on the way in which we see ourselves, and the ways in which we deal with nature.

In 2004 the Halle CargoLifter near Brandenburg was converted into an artificial tropical paradise with a rain forest, swimming pools and a heated beach. Sabine Haubitz and Stefanie Zoche recorded the transformation, so that one could see what elements are necessary to suggest a tropical setting. It's an illusion that demands a vast expenditure of energy.

Although we continue to cherish a desire for wild nature, man has become used to the complete adaptation of the natural environment to his wishes. Bonsai trees are on the one hand an extreme form of control that is exercised over nature, but behind the growing of bonsai lies a yearning for knowledge of and contact with nature. In that sense they are a metaphor for our search for a different relation with the natural environment.

Often the planting in an urban environment – the greenery in planters in front of a building, the trees along a road – has little more than a symbolic or decorative function. But in his series PRINTEMPS Christophe Maout has the plants take centre stage. By using a very short depth of field, the surroundings fall away and the cherry blossoms, irises and other plants become the stars. All the images were made by Maout in Paris and its vicinity, without any digital manipulation.

Within the highly urbanized environment of Hanoi, Jamie Maxtone-Graham captures the reactions of people who encounter a staged garden full of flowers, fruit, vegetables and animals that were bought in the markets of Vietnam’s capital. The result is a Rousseauesque game with our ideas of the exotic, in which the logic of the location, and the photographic document itself, are undermined.

Ardine Nelson (United States, 1948) uses both traditional and experimental photographic techniques in her work; years ago she was one of the first to experiment with the Polaroid process. Her work has often been exhibited in the United States and other countries, and she has received many working grants. She is professor emeritus in the photography programme of the Department of Art at Ohio State University.

What is Utopia, and what does it cost to build it? FOREST shows how they are trying to construct a utopia from scratch in the Chinese city of Chongqing. The goal is a model city incorporating five ‘ideals’. A woods is one of them. But rather than planting trees and patiently waiting for them to grow, full-grown trees are being uprooted for a sort of prefab forest. The promise of a beautiful future is thus being realized through methods that strain the resources of both culture and nature.

When it was designed in 1867 Prospect Park, in the heart of Brooklyn, New York, was the first American public park, accessible for all social classes. In her long-running project IN PLAIN AIR Irina Rozovsky photographs the park so that the surrounding city is no longer visible. She underscores the function of the park as an oasis of peace in hectic urban life, a place where people, albeit for only a short time, can come in contact with nature and can experience private, transcendent moments.

During the summers when she was nine and ten, Traer Scott spent her time in the local natural history museum. Her mother worked there as a volunteer, and wanted to save on the cost of child minders. Since that time Scott has cherished an enormous affection for everything that is old and mysterious. In her series NATURAL HISTORY she brings the dead and the living – the collection and the often young visitors – together.

Hampstead Heath was once part of London’s rural surroundings. Today it is a green oasis in the midst of a busy urban landscape. Andy Sewell regularly wanders in The Heath in search of nature, fully realizing that the area was shaped, and is maintained by the hand of man. His series THE HEATH is an investigation of what, precisely, nature is, but also of what the American biologist E.O. Wilson called ‘biophilia’ – the attraction you feel to the natural, without knowing exactly why.

It is ironic that a people who are confined themselves should confine and exhibit animals. The residents of Gaza are conscious of this irony. A zoo is a small prison, they say, and Gaza is a big zoo. Still, they do not identify with the animals, which have to do without names, and are often treated heartlessly. There are several zoos in Gaza, but they are all money-losing propositions. The only one who makes money on the zoos is the animal trader and smuggler Abu Nadal-Khalid, who for a substantial sum can get you any animal you want.

Scientists have sometimes suggested that memories are stored like JPEGs. They are broken up and saved in pieces, which are only put back together when they are called up. The missing data is filled in by the brain. Kurt Tong took his pictures in a botanical garden, in a large format and under ever-changing lighting conditions. He applied different techniques to destroy the information in the image, after which he scanned the images with scanners at different settings. Ultimately he assembled an image again from the results, in the same way that the memory makes a complete image again from fragments.

Scientists have sometimes suggested that memories are stored like JPEGs. They are broken up and saved in pieces, which are only put back together when they are called up. The missing data is filled in by the brain. Kurt Tong took his pictures in a botanical garden, in a large format and under ever-changing lighting conditions. He applied different techniques to destroy the information in the image, after which he scanned the images with scanners at different settings. Ultimately he assembled an image again from the results, in the same way that the memory makes a complete image again from fragments.

The phenomenon of a natural disaster can not be viewed apart from the presence of people. The destructive forces inherent in nature are essential for the development and evolution of the landscape, while man has a vital interest in controlling nature and bending it to his will. The images of THE QUIET OF DISSOLUTION, staged by Braas in her studio, deal with this contradiction, placing culture and order over against nature and chaos.

Alejandro Chaskielberg (Argentina, 1977) began his career as a photojournalist for various local newspapers and magazines. After studying industrial design and photography, in 2000 he became director of photography at the National Film Institute in Buenos Aires. These duties have in no way reduced Chaskielberg’s output as a photographer and documentarist. He is presently involved with the Noorderlicht project The Sweet and Sour Story of Sugar. His first monograph, La Creciente, appeared recently.

The Sundarbans, the largest mangrove swamps in the world and a UNESCO World Heritage Site, are under threat from rising sea levels. Sumit Dayal photographed the inhabitants of this area, who are being forced to move inland because their islands are being swallowed by the water. Four islands have disappeared into the sea in the last quarter century, leaving 6000 families homeless. Other islands, including Sagar, the largest island, are rapidly seeing their size decrease.

Volcanos have two faces. Eruptions bring death and destruction, as seen in 2010 when Mount Merapi in Indonesia claimed 324 lives during the worst eruption in a century. But at the same time volcanic soil provides a wealth of minerals that are necessary for agriculture. It is from that fact that volcanos encouraged the rise of kingdoms, such as the Majapahit empire on Java. Living around volcanos is a constant process of give and take.

In December, 1999, two massive storms raced across France, that destroyed 8 percent of its woodlands. Woods which were planted and managed by man were relatively harder hit. A year later Nigel Dickinson photographed the damage. Five years later he once again photographed the woods, to record the differences in the recovery of the woodlands that were being permitted to restore themselves naturally and those where human interventions were being made to encourage their recovery.

Two months after the disastrous earthquake that struck Haiti on 12 January. 2010, Wyatt Gallery went to Port-au-Prince with five fellow artists to do volunteer work and record the consequences of the disaster. What impressed him was the resilience of the people. Seven months later he returned to photograph life in the gigantic tent camps – cities in themselves. He did portraits of the people there who, thanks to their inner strength, were able to keep going in the midst of a humanitarian crisis.

Each spring, as the snow melts, many villages and cities in Quebec are at risk of flooding. In 2011 it was the turn of Venise-en-Québec, which lies on the banks of Lake Champlain. More than three thousand homes and businesses were damaged, and over a thousand residents had to be evacuated. The diptychs of WATER MEMORIES show the extent of the flooding, and the clean-up which followed. The core of the problem is the ambivalent relationship between man and water, Huneault says. Water attracts us, but at the same time remains an unpredictable force of nature.

On the 6th of April 2009 the historical centre of the Italian town of L'Aquila was severely damaged by an earthquake. In his work, which deals with L’Aquila and the consequences of the earthquake, Massimo Mastrorillo shows us how the landscape constantly changes in an emergency situation, without any serious long-term planning lying behind its evolution. Frozen in images these temporary landscapes look everlasting.

One of the central events each spring in Japan is hanami, the brief period when the cherry trees blossom. Katsumi Omori has captured that event for the last decade. It was obvious that in the spring of 2011, after the earthquake, tsunami and nuclear incident, he would go from Tokyo in the direction of the disaster-struck Fukushima in search of the blossoms. His images contain suggestions of things that people can not see, but which ares nonetheless present: anxiety, radiation and hope for the future.

One of the central events each spring in Japan is hanami, the brief period when the cherry trees blossom. Katsumi Omori has captured that event for the last decade. It was obvious that in the spring of 2011, after the earthquake, tsunami and nuclear incident, he would go from Tokyo in the direction of the disaster-struck Fukushima in search of the blossoms. His images contain suggestions of things that people can not see, but which ares nonetheless present: anxiety, radiation and hope for the future.

The river gives and takes. When the monsoon comes, it swells and swallows whole villages. Anything and everything is carried away with it – from gigantic, holy trees to ordinary garbage. Protick Sarker investigates life along the river, life that is totally dependent on the water, but is equally threatened by it.

In English, ‘to pass’ can mean ‘to go by’, or ‘to die’ or ‘to go from one state to another’. Pass Christian was also the name of an artists’ colony in Mississippi that was destroyed by the furious waters during Hurricane Katrina. Only 500 of the 8000 houses survived the disaster, and many residents never returned. In PASS S. Gayle Stevens records the ruins of the artists’ village in small, intimate images, shot with a pinhole camera.

Any marriage between tradition and modernity is doomed to failure, says Weixing Fu. In his bonsai-like reproductions of traditional landscapes he makes use of industrial and other modern elements, such as a shearlegs or an electrical cable.

By their circular form, the photos in LOOKING ON suggest a concentrated focus, especially on small things: birds among branches, a reflection in a window pane, a salamander under water, the extreme tip of a mountain. By focusing one’s gaze this way, that which is far away becomes closer, and that which is small becomes greater. Only then can you feel the soul of things, Hongxun Gao says. For LOOKING ON he made a selection of his best recent work.

We are only passing through this world, says Chaosheng Lu. We search for a place of our own, but for the most part lack direction. His apparently faulty, often blurred photos are the translation of the confusion that he feels. He identifies with the famous lament, ‘like a fly behind a window, I can see the future, but I can not find my way out.’ Ultimately, says Lu, he is still a little lost boy.

It is a bitter truth, Peiquan Wang observes: we are disgusted by garbage, but we keep on producing it all the time. By photographing the beauty of garbage, he tries to let us see it in a different way. Here and there he encounters trees that have been adorned with plastic bags and other trash. In his photos they becomes the flowers in an artificial landscape.

The Song dynasty mausoleum is one of the most photographed structures in China. Most of the photos use the same straightforward visual language, and testify to respect and honour for nature and history. How could you capture the mausoleum in a fresh, new way? Zhang Weixing chose an approach that resulted in experimental black and white photos which appear to be hand made rather than the product of technical means. The work seems to carry an implicit critique of the way in which current generations deal with cultural heritage.