Claudia den Boer’s Anchors takes silence as its subject rather than its atmosphere. Photographing between 2012 and 2015 on the Dutch islands, in small Belgian and southern French villages, and across the New Mexican desert, the Tibetan Highlands and the Moroccan Sahara, she approaches quiet as a condition with two faces: it draws her nearer to herself and, at the same time, is frightening to look at. The book shows, image by image, that silence is very different from emptiness.

Den Boer’s response to immense space was to look for something to hold on to in the images she was making — a branch, a rock, a tree, a house, an anchor. That impulse gives the sequence its name. The anchor is a way of composing: a small, specific thing that permits a person to stand in an overwhelming place. The locations gathered here are geographically far apart, yet the photographs hold to a single inquiry, and the calm places they describe are attractively inviting and frightening at the same time.

Anchors was published by The Eriskay Connection in 2016 as a Swiss-bound wrap-around hardcover, 48 pages, 300 by 300 millimetres, with 23 large-sized images. The book is designed by Rob van Hoesel. Its square format and binding reward attention to sequencing and objecthood — qualities that matter to anyone who follows the Dutch and wider European photobook tradition in which Den Boer’s book takes its place.