How does one picture a nature that is at once unreachable and all around us? Bas Ketelaars (NL) treats that question as a working method. His photographs often proceed in sequences, altering a small detail in each image or placing a filter between camera and subject, so that the images describe the space between the lens and the vista rather than the vista alone. Drawing enters on different terms: the speed and efficiency of the photograph contrasts with the manual slowness of the drawing, and the two systems are allowed to produce the image together.

The book gathers work rooted in residencies, among them a visit to Białowieża National Park in Poland, in the heart of Europe’s largest primeval forest, where Ketelaars photographed in search of a new representation of nature. He works with the Romantic tradition of landscape while testing what representation can hold: proximity and distance, space, transparency, densification, transformation. Seclusion in nature becomes seclusion in the studio, and the artist becomes visible in the construction of the view.

Edges of Landscape is the first occasion on which Ketelaars has combined his photographic material with drawings experimentally. Two essays accompany the plates, by Helen Westgeest, associate professor of modern art history and theory of photography, and Tim Ingold, professor of social anthropology. Rob van Hoesel designed the volume, printed by NPN Printers (NL) and supported by Mondriaan Fonds, Jaap Harten Fonds, Vincent van Goghhuis and Gemeente Breda. The 192-page Swiss-bound softcover measures 220 by 290 millimeters and is an English-language first edition of 800.

For a collector drawn to landscape photography that argues with its own conventions, and to books in which writing, drawing and photographic sequence are edited into a single argument, this is a considered addition to the shelf.