Twelve Waves takes its title from a number, not from the sea. The waves that Jörg Gläscher photographs are standing sculptures, built in the forest from found, broken pieces of wood. They do not undulate or break; they hold their ground, which is precisely the tension the book explores. Gläscher made them during the lockdown that followed the first global wave of the novel coronavirus in 2019, a period of silence, doubt and contemplation for which the forest became a refuge. The sculptures are at once the record and the residue of that time.
The book marks a deliberate turn in Gläscher’s practice, away from the documentary photography he pursued after studying under Timm Rautert at the HGB Leipzig, though not an abandonment of the medium. Rather than simply recording the objects, his photographs set the forest’s isolation against the waves’ dynamic formations, so that the works can be seen in what the publisher calls their might and mystery. The result sits between sculpture and image, asking the viewer to consider how a photograph can carry the weight of a thing made by hand and left in the open.
Hartmann Books has given the project a form that matches its restraint: a layflat hardcover, 22.5 by 34 centimetres, with 24 pages carrying twelve double-sided illustrations, plus a booklet and poster, designed by Florian Lamm in Berlin. A text by Markus Runte and an interview between Gläscher and Ute Thon accompany the images in German and English. The slimness is not incidental; the book’s scale and sequence ask to be read as a considered object rather than a survey.
For collectors, the interest lies in that combination of a familiar photographic career redirected toward handmade, site-specific sculpture, and a publisher known for attentive design. Twelve Waves appeared alongside the 2023–24 exhibition ‘wood, waves and energy’ at the Stadtmuseum Paderborn, giving the work a public context without reducing it to documentation. It is a quiet book about a quiet period, and it rewards the kind of looking that silence makes possible.
