Fertiliser rarely occupies the centre of a photograph. It arrives on fields as an abstraction — a price index, a policy problem — and its consequences are usually registered elsewhere: in soil, water, parliaments and occupied territories. Crystal Bennes’s “We Eat the Earth” makes that abstraction visible by following three nutrients — nitrogen, potassium and phosphate — across eight key sites, from Sweden to Western Sahara, England to occupied Palestine, Germany to the Netherlands. The book is structured as a set of reciprocal pairings: each mineral is bound to two or more sites of relation. Phosphate links the dispossession of indigenous people in Western Sahara to a Swedish artificial island fabricated entirely from the radioactive waste byproduct of fertiliser production. Potassium connects a Yorkshire mine marketing itself as a low-carbon fertiliser of the future to Israel’s long history of occupation and apartheid in Palestine. Nitrogen leads to Dutch politics, where environmental measures against fertiliser-related water pollution have fed the rise of a right-wing populist farmers’ party. Extraction, deployment and disposal are shown as one continuous system.
Bennes is credited with the text and photography and shares concept and edit with Carel Fransen, who is responsible for design and lithography. The 264-page softcover, published by The Eriskay Connection in 2026, is consequently a piece of book-making as much as a body of reportage. Sequence and pairing do the argumentative work. Rather than illustrating a written thesis, the photographs establish connections across distance, so that the reader’s act of turning a page becomes part of how the material flow is understood. That reciprocal looking is the book’s method.
The subject is not merely agricultural. Nitrogen fertiliser alone accounts for around five per cent of total greenhouse gas emissions, and widespread fertiliser use contributes to soil health decline, increased water pollution and substantial environmental destruction from related mining. Bennes extends the climate conversation to agribusiness companies, whose role in current crises has received less attention than that of fossil fuel producers. A closing focus on a small but expanding group of farmers producing food without fertiliser offers a hopeful view of the future of agriculture.
For collectors, the book’s interest lies in its structure and production: a first edition of 1,000 copies, conceived and edited by the photographer with Fransen, printed and bound by Wilco Art Books, and supported by Creative Scotland. It is a considered example of the photobook as argument, and it belongs with work that treats photography as a means of tracing systems rather than illustrating subjects.
