Christoph Naumann’s first book takes its title from the German word for noise, and the sound in question is that of the Autobahn. Over the course of a walking expedition along the A3, between the German-Austrian border and the Ruhr, Naumann photographed the immediate margins of the roadway — the strip of land that drivers register only as a blur at the edge of vision. Rauschen Noise, published by Hartmann Books in 2017, gathers fifty images across ninety-six pages, with Naumann’s own text in German and English.
The subject is not the highway as engineering or as symbol but as a habitat and a borderline. What accumulates in these pictures is the ordinary residue of a landscape organised around transit: embankments, service infrastructure, vegetation holding its ground against exhaust and mowing. Because the camera moves at walking pace rather than driving speed, the Autobahn’s surroundings become legible as terrain rather than as scenery passed through. The sequence asks the viewer to look at a place that convention teaches us to ignore.
The book’s making is inseparable from its form. Judith Anna Rüther’s graphic design and the hardcover binding with an open spine and dust jacket give the volume a physical register suited to its subject — a book that opens, like the road, along a continuous edge. At 22.6 by 30 centimetres, the plates hold their scale without becoming monumental. That Naumann both photographed and wrote for the book means the images and the accompanying text issue from a single sustained encounter with the route.
Rauschen Noise is presented by its publisher as a first edition of three hundred copies and is listed as sold out, with last copies available from the publisher. For collectors, its interest lies less in scarcity than in the coherence of the project: a defined geographic premise, a consistent method of walking and looking, and a design that treats the book as an object in its own right. It stands as an early statement by a photographer working at the edge of what landscape photography usually agrees to see.
