Loredana Nemes spent four years returning to the beech woods above the chalk cliffs of Rügen, the island coastline long embedded in German painting and history. What began as a walk became a sustained photographic observation of a place she calls a forest seascape: stands of beech set against the even, unbroken horizon of the Baltic. Her 2023 book, published by Hartmann Books, gathers that work into 112 pages and fifty tritone plates.

The subject is older than any authorship. These are archaic trees, weathered into forms that predate and will likely outlast the photographer, and Nemes attends to them through fog, snow, low cloud and changing light, letting season and weather do much of the compositional work. The result holds two registers at once. There is steadiness, robustness, a horizon that refuses drama. And there is fragility, because these forests now stand exposed to a changing climate. The book does not resolve that tension; it lets the photographs carry it.

A personal thread runs beneath the landscape. The beeches at the Königsstuhl recall the Carpathian forests where Nemes hiked as a child with her father, and the Rügen and Carpathian stands belong to the same UNESCO natural world heritage listing of ancient and primeval European beech forests. Nemes also contributes the book’s text. Hannah Feldmeier designed it; the hardcover is 24 × 31.2 cm.

For collectors, the case rests on the patience of the project and the coherence of its making: a single subject followed across four years and all seasons, printed in tritone, with a design that gives the horizon room. The book appeared alongside exhibitions at the Caspar-David-Friedrich-Zentrum in Greifswald, Chaumont-Photo-sur-Loire and Museum Sinclair-Haus, contexts that place the work in a longer conversation about forests in art rather than in the ephemera of the season.