Robin Hinsch’s Wahala takes its title from a West African term for trouble, and the trouble it examines is planetary in scale. Across 128 pages, Hinsch photographs sites where the extraction of raw materials for profit has left its bluntest marks on the earth and its inhabitants: the oil fields of the Niger Delta, the coal belt of Jharkhand, the open-cast mines of Brandenburg, North Rhine-Westphalia and Silesia. Published by GOST Books in 2022, the hardback volume gathers images that slip between detail and overview, landscape and portrait, the familiar and the foreign, until the viewer loses the thread of what and where, exactly, is being looked at.
What distinguishes Wahala from conventional documentary is its willingness to abandon straight reportage for associative sequences. Hinsch’s images are cinematic: gas flares burn beneath dark and brooding skies, dramatic terrain gives way to the collapsing ruins of buildings. The book does not present these places as specimens to be catalogued, but assembles them into new narratives that make the violence of global fossil-fuel dependency visible in ways that straightforward illustration cannot.
As Dr. Sophie Charlotte Opitz observes in her essay, the book translates that violence into visibilities that help us grasp its complexity; with the exploitation of the planet, we destroy ourselves. The photographs address not only the international companies extracting resources but the people who make their homes in these landscapes and, in some cases, hack back into the system that governs them. The result is at once a record of specific sites and a construction of meaning, with the mining regions of three countries held together by a single visual argument.
For a collector of contemporary photobooks, Wahala is significant less for any claim of novelty than for the consistency of its authorial vision and the seriousness of its ambitions. Hinsch treats the photobook as an instrument of inquiry rather than a portfolio, and the book’s sequencing and pacing are integral to the case it makes. Those who follow the recent turn toward landscape and extraction in photography will find in its 128 hardbound pages a considered, unsettling contribution to that conversation.
