The Ulrike Crespo Photography Prize is a joint project of the C/O Berlin Foundation and the Crespo Foundation. It honors artists who explore new concepts of nature through photography and other visual media, and is awarded annually. This publication presents the work of the first two prizewinners, Laura Huertas Millán and Sarker Protick.

Laura Huertas Millán (born 1983, Colombia) addresses the cultural, medicinal, and ritual uses of the coca plant, contexts that long predate the production of cocaine in nineteenth-century Europe. Taking the Spanish colonial prohibition of the plant as a point of departure, she constructs a speculative narrative around a group of women who secretly distributed coca leaves in the seventeenth century. Fiction serves as her means of approaching the colonial appropriation of nature and the resistance it provoked. Sarker Protick (born 1986, Bangladesh) focuses on the historical territory of Bengal, today extending across India and Bangladesh. His photographs translate an examination of the colonial history of the British Empire into an investigation of the present, centering on nineteenth-century railway expansion and coal mining. Traveling through Bangladesh and India, he assembles a body of images that addresses the global, geopolitical, and historical dimensions of imperialism as a key driver of the climate crisis.

The book is edited by Katharina Täschner for the C/O Berlin Foundation, with texts by Sria Chatterjee, Sara Garzón, and Katharina Täschner. It accompanies an exhibition at C/O Berlin from 14 September 2024 to 22 January 2025. The publication consists of two volumes, of 128 and 124 pages respectively, each containing 70 illustrations. The format is 17 by 24 centimeters. Design is by Naroska, Berlin. The edition is bilingual in German and English.