Across five extended trips in 2020 and 2021, Henrik Spohler travelled roughly 7,500 kilometres through the Netherlands, regarding the country from an outsider’s perspective. Flatlands collects the photographs made on those journeys. Its subject is not the picturesque polder of tourist imagery but Europe’s most densely populated country, threaded with roads, canals and rail lines, where nearly every square metre of land is put to use and water is managed through dikes, locks and channels. Industrial estates stretch along the transport corridors, and terrain once considered barely habitable marshland now stands for the thorough remaking of the environment by human activity.

Spohler works with the composure of a photographer conscious of his genre’s history. The Netherlands is where landscape painting decisively developed in the seventeenth century, and Flatlands can be read as a photographic response to that inheritance: a cultural landscape examined through economic and social structures rather than scenic effects. The sequencing is unhurried, allowing roads, waterworks and built edges to accumulate into an argument about use and control.

The 128-page hardcover is published by Hartmann Books in a 24.5 × 32 cm format, with 48 illustrations, an introduction by Spohler and a text by the novelist Gerbrand Bakker. It appears in German, English and Dutch, with design by Florian Pfeffer of one/one studio, Bremen. Setting a literary voice beside the photographer’s own framing gives the pictures room to be read rather than merely seen. Flatlands is Spohler’s sixth book.

For readers drawn to contemporary landscape photography and to how infrastructure shapes a national image, Flatlands is a considered, tightly argued volume. It treats one of Europe’s most engineered territories as both a subject and a test of what landscape photography can still describe.