Vital Mud begins with a stone that rattled. In the 1980s, the photographer’s uncle, a geologist, opened such a stone and found organic-looking structures that existing geological theory could not account for. The alternative “clay hypothesis”—that clay helped early life forms evolve—seemed to explain them better. Hiske Altena takes that unresolved object as the starting point for a photographic project, published by Eriskay Connection in 2023, that asks what the first life forms might have looked like: slimy tree-shaped structures, perhaps, or giant floating gas bubbles. Rattles stones, clay crystals, the life cycle of bacteria, and large oval shapes in the American landscape are gathered as possible evidence, alongside the recurring shapes and descriptions found in old fairy tales, myths, and religious stories.
The book is not an argument for a scientific claim so much as an exercise in looking. Altena builds a sequence in which images shift our perspective and prompt wonder at what humans are capable of, and she treats science as a continuous search for the unknown whose perspective shifts much as art does. That stance gives Vital Mud its distinctive character: a photographic collection that behaves like an inquiry, holding evidence and speculation in the same frame without forcing a verdict.
The making of the book was collective. Altena conceived the project and made the photographs, wrote text, and edited alongside Ellen Sanders and Karianne Bueno; Merel Bem contributed text, with text editing and translation by Daisy Hildyard. Esther de Vries designed the volume, published as a 144-page English-language Otabind softcover with a folded inlay, measuring roughly 21.7 by 30.4 centimeters. The format supports the book’s essayistic movement between stone, organism, landscape, and story.
Its dummy circulated at exhibitions and festivals internationally, was shortlisted for several awards including the Paris Photo/Aperture PhotoBook Award, and was selected as one of the Best Dutch Book Designs of 2021. Those facts describe a project tested in public before it became a book. For a collector, the interest lies in how Altena turns a family story and a contested hypothesis into a sustained visual argument about uncertainty.
