Lukas Felzmann

Swiss photographer Lukas Felzmann (born 1959), who taught at Stanford University for two decades, takes a two-part approach to California’s geography in a poetic journey along the crossroads of culture and nature. The first volume contained within the slipcase, Ground, is a carefully sequenced photobook containing one image for each of the state’s 58 counties, with no human presence but, as poet Forrest Gander writes, “marked everywhere by our signs.” The second book, Across, abandons this invisible grid to freely roam across the land, encompassing all the natural and man-made features that make California unique. A space of moving, belonging and contemplation is navigated through colors, grayscale and corridors of focus. The result is not only a journey across land but also across time and the process of photography itself.

Roads that peter out in the middle of nowhere, buildings that no longer make sense, flotsam and jetsam that defy oblivion: Lukas Felzmann's scenery and objects quietly and unobtrusively open up their profound symbolism in the field of tension between desire and memory, hope and pain, dream and reality. Together they form a narrative that follows its own rules, subtly carrying the viewer along on a strange journey, where broad landscapes and deep horizons become expanses onto which visions of all kinds can be projected. Uncompromisingly printed in a small format deliberately set apart from the typical coffee-table picture book, Landfall is like a literary work, an existential analysis of the truths and illusions of our civilization, or a piece of poetry full of surprising encounters, whose ambivalence requires repeated reading.