Landscape photography has mostly been an exercise in fidelity — the visible world recorded more or less as the eye receives it. Zak van Biljon takes the other route. His debut photobook, Modernising Nature, is made with near-infrared photography, a technology first developed for military reconnaissance and agricultural surveying, which registers the energy plants reflect beyond the visible spectrum. Chlorophyll does not survive that translation as green. It returns as electric pink and red, and the alpine and botanical subjects in the book look newly strange.
The intensity is not incidental. Van Biljon’s pictures are saturated, almost luminous, and they carry an argument with them: that in an age of digitalisation and urbanisation, nature might be looked at again, from an unfamiliar angle, and recognised on its own terms rather than through filters. The infrared palette does that work without illustration or sentiment. What looks artificial is, in fact, a more literal record of what the plants are doing than a conventional photograph would be.
Kehrer Verlag published the book in 2025 as a cloth hardcover of roughly 168 pages, with about ninety colour plates and a bilingual German/English text section. Gwendolyn Fässler and Lukas Tonetto are credited alongside the photographer; the listings available do not itemise their individual contributions. Van Biljon, who is based in Switzerland, has worked with near-infrared for years, and the project reads as accumulated research rather than a single season’s experiment.
For a collector, the case here is coherence rather than scarcity. This is a photographer’s first book, built on a method he has clearly defined and applied consistently, and it holds together as one sustained project instead of a gathering of unrelated pictures — the palette alone gives the sequence a spine. Books that stake everything on a single technical premise can date quickly. This one keeps its footing in the subject: how landscape is seen, and what it takes to see it differently.
