Rick van der Klooster spent school holidays with his mother in the Alps. After her terminal diagnosis in 2013, that landscape took on another life in memory, becoming a place where she could continue to exist in thought. Fear of returning and confirming her absence kept him away until July 2018, five years after her death, when he entered the high forest on the border mountain and heard the river on the far side calling him. Between the Mountain and the River, published by Fw:Books in 2025, gathers photographs from that return, part of an ongoing body of work begun in 2018.

The subject is grief and transience, approached through terrain rather than confession. Van der Klooster photographs the mountain landscape as at once overwhelmingly beautiful, eerie and mysterious, and his stated aim is to highlight the spiritual importance of nature to human beings. The river of the title is also a threshold between memory and the present, the sound that drew him back into a place he had been avoiding.

The book presents van der Klooster’s photographic project, issued by a publisher known for an exacting approach to the photobook as an object. It runs 128 pages in softcover at 23.5 by 29 centimetres. Hans Gremmen is credited as designer, shaping how the sequence is paced and how the landscape accumulates across the page.

For collectors, the interest lies in watching a photographer work through personal material without sentimentality, letting the mountain hold what a portrait cannot. The work sits within a European tradition of landscape used as elegy, and its formal restraint, together with Gremmen’s involvement, gives it a place on a shelf concerned with how grief is edited rather than described.

This is the English-language edition.