Awoiska van der Molen’s The Living Mountain is the third in her run of monochrome landscape books, after Sequester (2014) and Blanco (2017), and the one in which her photographs are asked to share the page with another medium. Fw:Books published it in Amsterdam in 2020.

The photographs were made in the mountains of Tirol, for the composer Thomas Larcher, then composer-in-residence at the Concertgebouw in Amsterdam. Larcher’s composition of the same name draws on those images; in the book the landscapes are set alongside reproductions of his scores and related remnants. The shared title is borrowed from Nan Shepherd’s prose meditation on the Cairngorms, written in 1942 and first published in 1977 — a text about entering a mountain until it stops being scenery.

The object itself is deliberately specific: 48 pages at 24 by 29 centimetres, in a cahier binding, printed in five colours with a varnish, on greyback paper with a sixteen-page section on IBO stock, Japanese-bound with black interiors, designed by Hans Gremmen. Scores and plates are not illustrations of one another here so much as separate weights carried on the same spread.

For a collector, the argument is one of sequence and collaboration rather than scarcity. This is the third stage of a body of work that is often read as a single project, and its interdisciplinary structure — photography, composition, book design — is uncommon in a field where the accompanying essay is the norm. The publisher records the title among its year’s selections and in the Best Dutch Book Design list.

Van der Molen has said she wants the images to touch something lodged in the body rather than the eye: an intuition about where we came from, a bedrock certainty in a precarious world. The darkness and slowness of this book are the means to that end.