Claudius Schulze is the photographer of *State of Nature*, published by Hartmann Books in 2017. The book brings together photographs made as Schulze travelled roughly 50,000 km across Europe, working from a crane platform with a large-format camera. The landscapes he records look picturesque at first, but each contains protective infrastructure: alpine panoramas crossed by snow sheds, the North Sea coast furrowed by breakwaters. Again and again, structures built to defend against natural disasters rise into the view. The project does not set out to draw a firm line between culture and nature; instead the photographs show how deeply the two spheres penetrate each other.
The volume runs to 172 pages and includes 61 color and 13 black-and-white illustrations. It is a bilingual English/German edition, with texts by Oskar Piegsa and Thomas Glade—essayists whose writing accompanies the photographs rather than the photographer’s own commentary. Design is by -SYB-. The book is published as a threadsewn softcover held in a bellyband-like slipcase, and the publisher notes a handling instruction: because it has no solid cover, it should be inserted into the banderole with the cloth-covered spine first. Format is 30 × 36 cm. The publisher lists the book as sold out, with only last copies remaining.
*State of Nature* is therefore a photographic project about European landscapes in which disaster protection has become an ordinary part of the scenery. Its images are not organized around lamenting intrusion but around observing how engineered safety has been absorbed into the terrain. The shortlisted Aperture Award/Paris Photo 2017 recognition is noted in the publisher’s press materials. For readers of contemporary landscape photography, the book presents Schulze’s sustained engagement with both the European terrain and the photographic conventions through which it is usually shown.
