Since 2012 Hans-Christian Schink has been photographing the thinly settled country beyond Berlin, the tracts of Brandenburg and Mecklenburg-Vorpommern that give this book its title and its subject. Hinterland gathers that work: seventy-six colour plates made across a landscape that is at once ordinary and unsettled, shaped less by towns than by the long reach of resource extraction. Schink is explicit that these are not portraits of specific places. Memory supplies as much as geography does; the pictures, he says, come out of a search without a destination. What they hold is a balance between a brittle, pared-back beauty and a melancholy that has its source in the land’s slow depletion.
The individual titles read as plain locational notes — Bei Kublank, Plath, Cölpin, Am Wanzkaer See — yet the names carry a disused, faintly foreign ring even to German readers. The effect is to detach the views from the familiar business of regional documentation and let them sit as fragments of a remembered or half-recognised terrain. The sequence unfolds across the clothbound volume, whose 29.5 × 31 cm format gives each plate room and allows changes in season, weather and distance to register as their own kind of argument.
Schink, born in Erfurt in 1961 and trained at the Academy of Visual Arts in Leipzig, has worked for decades at the meeting of nature and civilisation; landscapes have been the constant in a career whose work has been exhibited and collected internationally. This body of work belongs to that line of inquiry while sharpening it. A poem by Oswald Egger accompanies the photographs — an essayistic presence rather than an explanation — and the book’s bilingual German and English text keeps faith with its subject.
The book is a considered object: a long-running series sustained with unusual patience, edited as a sequence rather than presented as a portfolio of single images. Across its pages a quiet, specific landscape and the photographer’s own recollections are held in tension, and the design of the volume is part of the reading.
