Daniel Chatard’s Niemandsland takes as its subject the lignite mines of the German Rhineland, where the energy company RWE works some of Europe’s largest open-cast pits, above all Hambach and Garzweiler. These operations are among the continent’s heaviest sources of carbon dioxide emissions, and their steadily widening voids have consumed fields, forests, and whole villages. Chatard photographs both the excavated terrain and the people who grew up expecting their homes to disappear, a prospect made harder to accept by Germany’s stated commitment to renewable energy.

The book also records resistance. In 2012 environmental activists occupied Hambach Forest to halt its clearing; the confrontation sharpened in 2018, when police moved in, yet protests preserved part of the woodland. That outcome encouraged villagers and activists to cooperate, and their joint effort saved five threatened villages. Others had already been resettled, and Lützerath, the sixth, was demolished. Chatard follows this arc rather than treating it as background, describing the widening conflict between environmental, public, and economic claims as the country withdraws from coal.

His method matters as much as his subject. Chatard is no distant observer: he engages directly with residents and campaigners, and he circulated early versions of the project among them, so their perspectives shape the account and give weight to the emotional and physical strain of living beside the mines. The result documents a regional story whose implications reach well past the Rhineland.

Eriskay Connection issued the book in 2024 as a 224-page flush-cut hardcover, 24 by 32 centimetres, in German and English, with design and cartography by Carel Fransen, photo editing by Daniel Chatard and Aliona Kardash, and text editing by Manuel Stark. For collectors interested in documentary practice that treats its subjects as participants, and in precisely made European photobooks about energy and landscape, it is a considered acquisition.